Book Image

FusionCharts Beginner's Guide: The Official Guide for FusionCharts Suite

Book Image

FusionCharts Beginner's Guide: The Official Guide for FusionCharts Suite

Overview of this book

User experience can make or break any app these days, no matter whether it's a commercial product or an internal solution. While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite. Once you have mastered it, you can give your users a delightful reporting experience in no time at all. FusionCharts Beginner's Guide is a practical, step-by-step guide to using FusionCharts Suite for creating delightful web reports and dashboards. Getting you started quickly, you will learn advanced reporting capabilities like drill-down and JavaScript integration, and charting best practices to make the most out of it. Filled with examples, real-life tips and challenges, this book is the firstofitstype in the visualization industry. The book teaches you to create delightful reports and dashboards for your web applications assuming no previous knowledge of FusionCharts Suite. It gets your first chart up in 15 minutes after which you can play around with different chart types and customize them. You will also learn how to create a powerful reporting experience using drill-down and advanced JavaScript capabilities. You will also connect your charts to server-side scripts pulling data from databases. Finally you round up the experience learning reporting best practices including right chart type selection and practical usability tips. By the end of the book, you will have a solid foundation in FusionCharts Suite and data visualization itself. You will be able to give your users a delightful reporting experience, from developers to management alike.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
FusionCharts
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 2. Customizing your Chart

Now that you have created your first couple of charts, you must be curious to customize them both aesthetically and functionally. As charts are typically part of a larger application such as an internal reporting system or a CRM dashboard, it becomes necessary to bring the overall look and feel of the application to the charts as well. Also, the users of different applications vary widely bringing in the need for functional customization, while some of them can interpret complex figures in seconds, others need visual cues to understand their data better.

In this chapter, you will learn how to:

  • Customize visuals of the chart including border, background, and font

  • Control how numbers appear on the chart

  • Add visual context to data such as target sales on a monthly sales chart using trend lines

  • Personalize the chart by adding your logo and URL

  • Make your charts cater to an international audience by using multilingual characters

Let's get started.

Know thy chart

Before...