December 13, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Hello All,
For a new reporting project compact "Tufte-like" and very clean and simple data visualizations as sparklines and bullet graphs have become a requirement.
We're having a difficult time finding a way to do them.
Even third party products do not seem to support RS, one that does requires it on top of analysis services and their sparklines are actually defined in the KPI-s, but we are not using AS.
Have any of you had reports inspired by Tufte or Few and implemented it,
how did you manage it?
as always, the consideration of this community is greatly appreciated!
Skål - jh
January 10, 2008 at 3:47 pm
You've probably already checked out this vendor, but in case you haven't, take a look at:
http://www.bonavistasystems.com/index.html
They were recently acquired by XLCubed, but I beleve their products can still be viewed at the above site.
cheers,
gt
January 11, 2008 at 9:31 am
The bonavistasystems stuff looks pretty neat and by acquiring XLCubed have a lot of Excel integration experience behind them. I've not load tested it or seen what impact it has on the back end but my first look at it it seems pretty quick.
January 11, 2008 at 11:23 am
They are the only compact graphic tool I've seen and it looks great.
There's a lot of new hope with XLCubed and all for more flexible use with RS.
We need components that can do text sized graphs like spark lines and bullet graphs both in Reporting Services and ASP.NET. But they just are not out there.
We've found that building your own for Reporting Services is difficult and so many details are still not documented on CRI-s it makes for a very time intensive exercise.
Honestly it still amazes me that the great ideas from Tufty and Few have not taken stronger root with charting vendors and that massive speedometers and 3D charts are most all the market offers.
At least somebody out there is perusing it. Am keeping an eye on XLCubed and MicroCharts.
Skål - jh
January 11, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Yes, I love the sparklines, bullet graphs, etc. in BonaVista Systems package. I use them frequently.
I suspect the reason why other vendors haven't gotten on the ball is that their customers, the people who buy their products, either aren't the ones who use the product, or those people don't understand the research into visual perception on which Tufte's and Few's ideas are based. They don't get the need to have lots of clean, easily grasped data on a single screen so that patterns, trends, and correlations between various metrics can be spotted.
October 24, 2008 at 12:18 am
iT-Workplace have just announced a product which adds these visualizations as SQL Server Analysis Services custom functions.
October 29, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Have you created sparklines in SSRS yet? This can be done with a simple line chart and removing all of the grid lines, legends, etc. and then you can embed that into a table (How To: Build Sparkline Reports in SQL Server Reporting Services). With SSRS 2008 (and Report Builder 2.0) you can utilize the Dundas visualizations that have been incorporated - charting (58 charts) and gauge (21 gauges) components. You can do the bullet displays in SSRS 2008 and these new visualizations have just been release for .NET framework 3.5 - Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET Framework 3.5 Released!.
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Dan English - http://denglishbi.wordpress.com
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