Charts windowing

Sometimes it could be interesting to display large number of values on a chart especially line or bar charts.

When we have hundreds of figures to display on a single chart, the chart becomes unreadable.

To solve this issue, we have need to filter the chart, add sections, etc., or anything to display something that makes the chart understandable.

For instance, this chart shows Sales Amount and Order Quantity over Country and Time per day with 4.5 years of data so it’s really difficult to understand the content.

Charts windowing

To make charts more readable I used tricks through input controls to create charts windowing.

In addition, I created a second input control to manage the period type to be displayed on the chart: year, quarter, month, week, day.

I created a measure variable to be used by an input control to manage the time window:

• Moving periods: =RunningSum(1;Row;([Sales Territory Country]))

Then I created an input control based on this variable.

To manage the period type to be used by the chart, I created 2 other dimension variables:

• Period Type: =1
• The Period: =If ([Period Type] = 1) Then [The Date formatted]
  ElseIf ([Period Type] = 2) Then [The Week]
  ElseIf ([Period Type] = 3) Then [The Month]
  ElseIf ([Period Type] = 4) Then [The Quarter]
  ElseIf ([Period Type] = 5) Then [The Year]

Now “The Period” variable is used in the chart as dimension and “Period Type” variable is used by another input control.

Now I can change the time window.

I can also change the period type. By changing the period type I also need to adapt the moving periods to be in the range of the number of periods to be displayed.

You can download the Web Intelligence report attached to that publication.

Didier MAZOUE