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 While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite.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

Arrange data whenever possible


As we saw in the previous chapter, whenever the data in the chart does not have to follow a time-based or alphabetical sequence, arranging the data in ascending or descending order makes data analysis a lot easier.

As our aim was to find the highest selling store in Dec 2011, arranging the data in descending order was the obvious choice, as shown in the previous screenshot. Choosing the order follows naturally from the purpose of the chart.

Arranging data is not limited to column and bar charts only. It can be quite helpful in pie charts as well. Let’s say you had a pie chart showing the breakdown of revenue from different countries for 2011, as displayed in the following screenshot:

While it is easy to see that US brought in the most revenue in 2011, finding out the second and the third best countries does require a fair amount of looking around. This can be made much easier by simply arranging the data, as in the following screenshot: