The charts in the graphomate add-on are based on the SUCCESS rules for data visualization and business communication, compiled by Rolf Hichert. A known pitfall when developing dashboards is that a dashboard can consist of colorful and shiny pie charts that are nice to look at but not always that effective to use. A dashboard should present data in such a way that the users can perform effective analysis, compare values, and quickly see what is good or bad. For more information on the SUCCESS principle by Hichert, check http://www.hichert.com/en/success.
The graphomate add-on charts include six charts: Bar & Column, Needle, Deviation, Line, Stacked, and Waterfall. Compared to the standard charts in SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, these charts tend to look a bit minimalistic and clean with no axes and little color, but they can help you to create really useful dashboards.
Go to the graphomate website and request a trial at http://www.graphomate.com/en/contact_trial/. We will use a very simple dataset for this recipe, as shown in the following screenshot:
- Open a new empty SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards file.
- Add the graphomate Chart component to the canvas.
- Go to the properties pane and enter the serial number you got when requesting the trial. This will activate the component and you'll see a chart appearing.
- Now go back to the General tab and select the Data sub-tab. Here we can bind the data from the spreadsheet to the component. Bind the Measures field to cell range A7:H7.
- Bind the Basic values field to cell range A8:H8.
- Bind the first Category labels field to cell range A6:H6 and bind the second field to cell range A5:H5.
- Go back to the General tab and select Chart type as Deviation.
- Finally, check Percentage deviation chart.
In this recipe, we quickly set up a Deviation chart from the graphomate charts add-on. We compared data over two years with their quarterly target values. The final chart provides both the nominal deviation from the target as well as the percentage. This makes it easy to find out which period did best and worst. The double category label option made it easy to add years to the x-axis without cluttering it with a lot of recurring values.
This recipe only showed a very basic setup of a graphomate charts add-on chart. As we have seen, there are in total six chart types that can be used in both a horizontal and vertical orientation. The charts can be completely customized to the finest details. Visit the graphomate website (http://www.graphomate.com/) for a list of all the features.