Creating Dynamic Sizing Charts with Pentaho Report Designer.

Posted under Open Source, Pentaho, Report Designer, Tutorials, Visualisation

Pentaho Report Designer’s (PRD) charting capability is great – it has numerous charts to choose from and the formatting is extremely flexible. However I did have a problem with charts represent large data sets. For example I had a list of countries and a bar chart showing the population for each country, users were able to view one or more countries at a time using a multi value list parameter. The problem occurred when there were too many countries, the chart’s labels became unreadable. One method was to create a chart which had a dynamic width depending on the amount countries a user selected.

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Pentaho Report Designer and Excel Data Sources.

Posted under Pentaho, Report Designer, Tutorials, Visualisation

Last week I had a regular Excel/Access user approach me with a problem:

I have 40 sale campaigns. I need to put together a quick presentation (as a PDF) which will show 2 key metrics (New and Loss revenue) for each of the 40 sale campaigns. Do you know of a quick way I can produce this presentation?

I thought this would the perfect opportunity to show off Pentaho Report Designer (PRD) as an alternative to Mircosoft Excel, Access or other big BI vendors. Below is a step by step guide on how I accomplished this.

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Free Tools to Create Sparklines.

Posted under Open Source, Pentaho, Visualisation

Sparklines are an invention by Edward Tufte and are a great way to provide a bare-bones and space efficient time-series context for measures (Few, Stephen. 2006. Information Dashboard Design). If you would like to read more up on Sparklines I suggest you get Edward Tuftes book Beautiful Evidence – there is a whole chapter dedicated to Sparklines.

Below is a list of open source and free tools which support or are dedicated to creating Sparklines or Microcharts.

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VisualPlace – A Victorian Government Map Mashup.

Posted under News, Visualisation

In December 2009 the Victorian Government released a “proof of concept” mashup with demographic and government services data known as VisualPlace.

VisualPlace is a six month Proof of Concept testing innovative ways of capturing, exploring and visualising government information and services through maps. VisualPlace brings together information from a wide variety of sources from service locations to demographic data to allow you to create custom maps.

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