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 While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite.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

Delegate detailed info to tooltips


Capabilities such as tooltips and drill-down are what make interactive charts much more useful than Excel-type images. In an image, all the information associated with a chart has to go on the chart itself. Quite often, this results in the chart getting cluttered with excessive details. to prevent that, the details are crimped. However, with interactive charts, all the detailed information can go in the tooltip. So in a chart showing daily footfall at a store, the explanation for why there was a sudden increase or decrease in the number of visitors can easily go in the tooltip, as shown in the following screenshot:

By putting the details in the tooltips, the chart stays clean and the user has all the required details at his disposal. However, how does the user know that he can get more info by hovering over a data point, or clicking on tablets and smartphones? The points with more details on them can be highlighted and we can add a simple message in the...