According to the University of Minnesota, human brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than they do text. The field of data visualization has leveraged on this very ability of human brain to draw inference from an image or pattern to facilitate quicker and positive decision making. By viewing an effective visualization, a person must be able to reveal conditions, patterns, and correlations between vital components and the effects they all have within a business framework.
Despite the advent of many fancy visualization techniques, a column/bar chart holds its ground in visualizing data distribution in the most effective manner. In this blog, we will discuss the additional features offered by VBX Advanced Column/Bar Chart compared to the conventional VBX Column/Bar Chart.
To compare two measures beyond the traditional way: While a traditional column or a bar chart enables simple juxtaposition of two measures, an advanced column/bar chart provides the ability to observe variance between these measures in an absolute and percentage format. It eliminates the need to perform calculations in the backend to bring variance as a separate measure.
Additional configuration is not required to calculate variance: The ‘Variance in %’ and ‘Absolute Variance’ measures are built on the fly when the chart loads. There is no additional calculation that a developer needs to perform to achieve this visualization.
Built in conditional formatting rules: The nature of variance is represented in terms of colors without the need to build conditional formatting rules. Red represents negative variance and green represents positive variance by default. This eliminates the need to define rules explicitly, to reflect positive and negative data.
Built in feature to display only Top N members: Often times, when there are too many dimension members to be visualized using a Column/Bar chart, the inference that can be drawn from it becomes poor. Hence it is advisable to represent a fraction of this data, in our case Top N members.
Up to 6 chart types available for visualization: VBX Advanced Column/Bar chart provides varied visualization capabilities like column-pin, column stacked, bar deviation etc. This feature provides bandwidth to a developer to choose appropriate representation of the dimension members.
Some of the examples for chart types are shown below:
