Reports: Creating a New Chart

Spiro Reports provides an easy to use drag and drop interface to create charts fast & easy. You can create various types of charts including Bar, Line, Pie,Stacked, Scatter, Area, Combination, Funnel, Web and 3D charts by simply dragging and dropping the required columns into the respective shelves in the design area.

You can change the chart type any time without having to recreate it. You can also apply the appropriate aggregate functions on the columns to calculate and summarize data the way you want it.

Creating a Chart

To create a chart, follow the steps given below:

• Open the reporting database in which you would like to create a chart.
• Click New button in the top left corner of the database and select New Report.

• In the New Reports tab that opens, click Chart View.
• In the Select Base Table dialog box that opens, select the required table in your database on which you want create the chart and then click OK.
• The Chart Designer opens as shown below.

You can also create new chart by opening the corresponding data table on which you want to create the chart and invoking New > New Chart View option in the toolbar.

On the left hand side is the Column list pane, listing all the columns available in the table. On the right hand side, you can see the Design Area with shelves to drop the columns and a Preview area below to view chart created.

You must drag and drop the required columns listed in the Column list pane into the respective shelves inorder to create a chart. You can also select the check box adjacent to each column listed to auto place the columns into the appropriate shelves. After dropping the columns click on the option Click here to Generate Graph to create the new chart. 

Given below is a brief description of each of the shelves in the Graph tab.

• X-Axis: Column dropped in this shelf appears horizontally across X-axis.
• Y-Axis: Column dropped in this shelf appears vertically across Y-axis. You can drop multiple columns in this shelf to create charts with multiple Y-axes.

  Here is an example to illustrate how to create a simple bar chart. We will create a chart to display the Sales trend across all years using a sample store sales data. Drag and drop the Date and Sales columns to X and Y - Axis and click on the button "Click here to Generate Graph". You will notice that as soon as the button is clicked a bar chart will be created.

  

• Color: When a column is dropped in this shelf, the chart will be further categorized showing each data point in this column in different colors (different data series) in the chart.

  Continuing the above example, if you want to create Date-wise Sales by Region chart, drag and drop Region column into the Color shelf. Now, the chart will be further categorized based on Region and each region will be assigned a unique color as shown in the below screenshot.

  

• Text: Includes the corresponding value of the dropped column as data label in the chart, according to the function applied on the column.
• Include columns for Tooltip: Includes the corresponding value of the dropped columns in the chart tool-tip, according to the function applied on the column. 

Following screenshot describes how would a final chart would look like (in view mode) when Text and Include columns for Tooltip options are selected.

• In Edit Design mode, you will notice that a menu appears on mouse over the top right corner of the Columns List pane. You can expand, sort and filter the list of columns using the options available in this menu. The available options are: 

  • Expand All and Collapse All: The 'Expand All' allows you to expand the field`s list, the 'Collapse All', collapses the table.
  • Apply Sort: You can sort the column either by name or by type, you may also further sort it in ascending or descending order.
  • Apply Filters: This option is useful when you need to filter the columns based on the data type. 
  • Show Involved columns: Lists the columns involved in creating the report.

  

Applying Functions on Columns

Spiro Reports allows you to apply aggregate/categorical functions like Sum, Count, Average, Min, Max, etc., on the data columns to group and summarize data in charts. When you apply a function on a column, a single value will be returned which is derived based on the values in the column. The default function for a Numeric (including Currency) data type is Sum and for a Date data type is Year. If the data type of the column is string (Categorical/Dimension column) and not numeric, then the default function applied is Actual Values.

To change the default function applied, after dropping the column, select the required function (aggregate/categorical) from the drop-down list present on the column. Drop-down list displays all the applicable functions based on the data type of the column, as shown in the screenshots below.

String Data Type

Numeric Data Type

Date Data Type

For instance, if you want to plot Average Sales for each Month across each Region, select Average function from the drop-down list for Sales (Y Axis) column, Month & Year function for Date (X Axis) column and select Actual Values function for Region (Color column) and then click on the button 'Click here to Generate Graph'.

The following tables list all the functions along with the description of their functionality.

Numeric and Currency Data Types:

Date Data Type - Actual Value Functions:

Date Data Type - Seasonal Value Functions:

Date Data Type - Aggregate Function:

String(Categorical/Dimension) Data Type:

Advanced Summarizing Options

When creating a chart, Spiro Reports provides advanced summary functions, apart from the basic functions such as Sum, Max, Min or Average. This allows you to summarize data values in that column based on the values in other columns. Using this you will be able to do some powerful calculations on a chart like running total of sales over years or calculate the difference in sales from the previous year etc.,

Following are the advanced summarizing options: 

The following screenshot illustrates a sample chart with different advanced summary functions applied.

Choosing Chart Type

After creating a chart, you can easily change it to another chart type by simply clicking on a button without changing the plotted data. For example, you have created a Bar chart, but then decide that you want the data to be displayed as a Pie chart. You can do this by changing the chart type using the toolbar or you can use Other Charts button on the toolbar.

Toolbar provides you with the options to choose between Pie, Bar, Stacked Bar, Line, Scatter and Table chart types at the top level. If you do not find the chart type that you are looking for, then click on Other Charts button in the toolbar and select the chart type that you want to apply from the Chart Options dialog box that appears. You can view a brief description of each chart type the bottom of the dialog box by clicking on the specific chart type. Notice that chart types that are not applicable/unsupported for the combination of columns that you are using to create the chart will appear disabled.
After selecting the required chart type in the dialog box, click OK.

The below table describes the various Chart types supported by Spiro Reports. For a detail understanding of the chart types and the combination of columns used to create them, refer to this help documentation.