Since seeing Edward Tufte’s post regarding Slopegraphs, I’ve been attempting to create one using SAP Crystal Reports. The benefits of a slopegraph is that they let you compare the relative positioning of one dimension against all others in the same set while also letting you track the performance of an individual dimension from that set over time. To lift a great, but potentially depressing, example from Tufte’s post:

This image shows a slopegraph from Tufte’s post.  The slopegraph in this example shows the survival rates of particular cancers.  As mentioned above, slopegraphs have the ability to show relative performance of dimensions as well as performance over time of individual dimensions. In the image above, you can see that the table graph shows Prostate cancer has a higher survival rate than Thyroid. Thyroid has a higher survival rate than Testis cancer. So on and so forth. In addition, you can also see that Prostate cancer alone has a better survival rate within 5 years than at 20 years.

Upon seeing the post by Tufte, I realized that this type of graph would be very interesting for monitoring various aspects of business performance. For example, how each product is performing relative to each other and year over year. As such, I have attempted to recreate this type of display in SAP Crystal Reports. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as I would have liked; however, hopefully I can change this in the future as this is a very useful type of information presentation.

As you can see in the image above, I was able to get close while using SAP Crystal Reports 2011.  This report uses a group for each cancer type which then has a chart inserted into the group header. I turned off the legend, all borders, all titles, and all gridlines. I turned on the data labels and set the x-axis labels to display on the top rather than the bottom.  The problem is that I cannot get the line charts close enough together without reducing the line size so much that it shows virtually no slope whatsoever.  The image below shows what happens if I try to get the labels closer together.

Unfortunately, the slope of the line becomes so compressed that it does not really allow for any helpful recognition of a decrease or increase in survival rates. I have, however,  been able to successfully list the various cancers in the order of survival rates.    I’m still considering possible ways to implement this chart and will post a solution when I have one.

Comments on possible solutions are definitely welcome.

Coy