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.
Creating Dynamic Sizing Charts with Pentaho Report Designer.
Posted under Open Source, Pentaho, Report Designer, Tutorials, Visualisation
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.
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.
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.