Chart Visualizations

Chart Basics: Creating Your First Chart

Load up a GL Balances Report. Filter down to a few object accounts that have amounts. Within the View

Ribbon Tab, click on New Visualizations and New Chart to open the Visualization Designer. Click into the Series section. There will be a plus icon. Click on this to add a row to the chart.

Click into the Categories section. There will be a plus icon. Click on this to add a column to the chart.

Click on the Preview icon up the top left of the Visualization Designer. You should see a chart in the right panel of the dialog.

Congratulations. You’ve just created your first chart.

Chart Basics: Adding additional columns

Right now your chart looks fairly basic, however you can add more columns from your report to make the chart more useful.

In the Categories section, click on the plus icon again to add another column to the report. Click on the selection drop-down to specify which column to display.

Run the report again to see data change.

Chart Basics: Changing the Data Axes

By default, a chart will show your value columns as your vertical data (Y axis) and your label columns as your horizontal data. In the Series section, you can switch this order by selecting the Source drop-down and specifying Vertical.

Horizontal Data Arrangement:

Vertical Data Arrangement:

Chart Basics: Changing Column Colors

By default, the colors of columns in charts are assigned automatically. You can choose a different color for a column right-click on the color box of the column in the chart legend and selecting the required color from the pop-up that is then displayed.

A column’s colors for ‘Vertical’ and ‘Horizontal’ sources will be different.

Remember that the appearance of the chart in the preview will stay the same until the chart preview is refreshed. The selected color is highlighted in the pop-up. If there were no changes, ‘Auto’ will be highlighted.

To change the color of a column back to the default “Auto” color, access the color selection pop-up for the column as described above, and select the “Auto” option. Note that if that color is no longer available because it has been assigned to a different column, the next available “free” color will be selected instead.

Further Charting Options

Series Section

• Item: Used to indicate what data will be displayed.

  • If there are subtotal or grand totals on the base report, these can also be selected if the

    Series Section Source drop-down is set to horizontal.

• Selection: Used to specify which column is specified.
  • Only editable if the Series Section Source drop-down is set to vertical.
  • Types include:
    • Line
    • Spline
    • Area
    • Area Spline
    • Column
    • Bar
    • Pie
      • Be aware that the use of pie should be limited as it proves hard for comparison purposes.
    • Scatter
      • Good for use with data where you need to identify outliers.
    • Waterfall
    • Funnel
      • Often used to represent stages in a sales process and show the amount of potential revenue for each stage.
• Type: Used to specify what chart should be shown.
• Style: Used to specify whether the chart type is shown as:

• Default
• Stacked: Multiple columns will be shown on top of each other
• Stacked 100%: Multiple columns will be converted into a percentage view
  • With multiple columns it is suggested to not show both amounts and percentages on the same chart

• Expression: Used to derive the column caption to display on the chart, but can be overridden to a hard-coded caption.

• Axis: Used to specify which axis the charts amounts will be displayed against.

  • You can specify either the primary or secondary axis.

• If you wish to use the secondary axis option, you need to make sure the secondary axis is enabled in the Value Axis section.

• Be careful when setting up a secondary axis because a user can become confused as to which axis applies to which amount in a Hubble Web context.

• Advanced - Label Values: Provides the ability to have text overlaid on the graph for each point on the chart.

This is not commonly used because visualizations employ a mouse hover over approach, where the data is shown for that one item. If there are large number of points on your chart, this can reduce readability.

• Advanced – Show in Legend: Gives the ability to specify whether the given data will be shown in the legend.

Categories Section

• Item: Used to indicate the way that the data is displayed.

  • If there are subtotal or grand totals on the base report, these can also be selected if the

    Series Section Source drop-down is set to vertical.

• Selection: Used to specify which column is specified.

  • This is only editable if the Series Section Source drop-down is set to horizontal.

• Expression: Used to derive the column caption to display on the chart, but can be overridden to a hard-coded caption.

Value Axis Section

• Axis: Used to enable or disable axes in your chart.

• Title: Used to override the title on your axis.

• Alignment: Used to specify axis position on your chart (top, center or bottom).

• Axis Placement: Used to specify where the axis is displayed.

• Min/Max: Used to specify the minimum and maximum points on an axis.

Applying a minimum axis can be useful for showing smaller amount variances, however be careful to not have a minimum value that is set higher than the actual amount as the data will not be displayed.

Category Axis Section

• Axis: Used to enable of disable axes in your chart.

  • You can override the text displayed as well using standard title formatting options.

    • This gives you the ability to put filter values into the title.

• Alignment: Used to specify where the axis title is displayed (left, right, center).

• Axis Placement: Used to specify where the axis is displayed.

General Section

• Title: Used to specify the title in the chart.

• When a user loads the chart in Hubble Web, the title displays in the Workspace. The saved name of the chart is available in the Workspace Table of Contents.

• A title can be configured with the values specified in the original report filters to make the title more useful.

• Subtitle: Used to specify the title in the chart.

  • Similar to the title, a subtitle can also contain further information from the underlying base report.

A suggested subtitle would be the following in order to display the base report, date and time in the subtitle:

“Report: <SavedName> Run Time: <RunDate:d> <RunDate:t>”

• Legend: Used to control the legend shown on the chart, its location (top, center, bottom), its justification (left, right, center) and layout (horizontal, vertical).

For legends with long text (e.g. when Code and Description is enabled for a label column), we suggest enabling a vertical layout to increase readability.

• Group Tooltip: When hovering over any point on a chart, a tooltip will be displayed to show the Amount figure for the given point. A Group Tooltip allows you to display multiple amounts when you have multiple value columns in your base report data for a given row.

  1.  Enabled    2.  Disabled

Chart Visualization Example: 12 Months of Amounts

A common thing would be to track Business Units/Companies amounts over 12 months.

The challenge from a charting perspective is that this becomes very hard to analyze. The following example shows 4 business units total revenue over 12 months:

The data, however, is very hard to understand. A better way to see it is by changing within the Series section the Type to Area and the Style to Stacked. You then have the ability to compare one business unit’s activity to the total.

Chart Visualization: Waterfall

This is a very specific chart which is designed to show the positive or negative adjustment to a starting number that results in the final number. Conditions for a Waterfall report are that the first columns add up to the final column.

This can be done by including a calculation in the report, e.g. COL1 +COL2 + COL3 = COL4 or by using existing period logic CE1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12=CE12. For my base report, my data set is the following:

All Periods are added within the Category section of the Hubble Initializer and once completed, a Waterfall Chart will look like the following:

Waterfalls are designed to work with one row of data. Multiple rows will not be displayed correctly.

In the above Waterfall scenario, the figures were all showing positive growth towards the final total.

The following example shows how the Waterfall chart will show negative growth towards a final total by coloring the problem period in red instead of green.