Coy Yonce

another attempt at creating slopegraphs in crystal reports

cyonce — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 04:49:07 +0000

In my previous post, I presented the slopegraph which Edward Tufte wrote about in his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. In that post, I was having some trouble representing a slopegraph using SAP Crystal Reports 2011; however, I think that I have been successful and creating a reasonable representation using SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise.

I was having some issues with getting the chart labels on the left hand side to line up with the start of the line in each chart. As such, I just stretched the labels to cover the height of the chart and rotated the text to a 90 degree angle. While this is not ideal from a readability standpoint, it is definitely better than the previous example. The line charts do show a pretty good slope. In the example above, it fairly easy to determine how each resort is performing year over year. You can also determine that the Hawaiian Club resort brings in the highest amount of revenue when compared to the other two resorts based upon the fact that it is the first chart in the list. Again, I hid all irrelevant components of each chart so that the line appears to just be part of a table-like display; however, the report itself is created based on groups defined by resort and then a line chart in the Group Header of each group to show year over year change in revenue.

Suggestions for making this better? How does it compare to Tufte’s display and the purpose of a slopegraph?

Coy

my adventure in creating slopegraphs with crystal reports

cyonce — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 04:15:56 +0000

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

online demos of business intelligence software

cyonce — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 22:54:54 +0000

As part my role at SAP, I am responsible for researching the activities of competitors when it comes to new product releases, exciting features, and their place in the market versus ours. As such, I’m constantly on the lookout for any online demos or tours of software that is offered by our competitors. I have provided a list of the demos and/or tours that I have found so far during my research today. I will continue to update this list. If you have one that you think should be added, let me know.

IBM

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