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 While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite.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

Use descriptive captions


The caption of a chart should describe what the chart is completely about. In a chart showing the website traffic for a particular time period, the caption should clearly mention the purpose of the chart along with the time period for which the data is being displayed, as shown in the following screenshot:

The caption should also mention the scale and the units of the numbers on the chart, if any. In fact, the caption should be so descriptive that the axes titles, if used, are only present as reinforcements.

However, with so many details in the caption, it might be difficult to accommodate everything in one line. That is when the subcaption comes into play. Typically, the units and scale of the numbers on the chart are delegated to the subcaption and so are details of lesser importance, as shown in the following screenshot: