How to make charts
To create one chart at a time, use a spreadsheet. It is good enough. If you have structured data, lots of variables, and don't work for the government this method is time-consuming and laborious.
Using our platform you can create charts on an industrial scale. Why is this useful? Visualized data is much easier to comprehend and interpret than data in a table. Lots of visualized data is much better than some visualized data.
Step 1: Start from a dataset.
Click on the charting icon to display the chart create page.
This first page lets you select which other data sets you would like to include in this chart.
Step 2: Select variables
The second step is to select which variables you want to plot. Select as many as you need, if you forget any you can always go back and select more.
Then press the Next Step button, located at the end of the list.
Step 3: Specify properties of those variables.
Are they numeric variables or multi-dimension variables?
Which, if any, is the primary variable (this one goes on the x-axis when you plot a chart with two or more variables).
Press Next Step to go to the next page of previous step to go back.
Do you want group values of numeric variables together? Selecting the group option displays a small form that lets you group values into Logical, User Defined and Useable bands.
- Logical: creates bands of "standard" width e.g, 0-10,11-20,21-30, etc.
- User: you define the bands giving a list of the beginning of each band e.g. 0, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, etc.
- Useable: Adjusts the band width so each band has the same number of rows in it. You just need to specify how many bands you need.
Step 4: What do you want to plot?
Select which variables and combination of variables you want to plot.
The application will automatically combine all variables with the variable set as primary. You then need to select what type of information to plot:
- Sum
- Count
- Average within Primary
- % Distribution
- % Within Primary
The Separate Chart here forces the application to create a new chart for each measure of a variable. In other words, Sum, % Distribution will all appear on separate charts if this box is ticked. Otherwise, they will be on the same chart,
You can also select filters to apply to this chart at this stage.
Step 6: Now plot all of these charts by pressing Next Step. Any chart with more than 25 legend entries will not be plotted since the speed of display is controlled by the browser and a large number of legend entries will really slow down the page. For these charts, we put a note saying "Chart Not Displayed". These charts have been created and they can be viewed in the Manage Charts table.
When the chart is displayed, you can decide to add a comment to it or delete it (no undo feature yet though)
Chart contents and labeling: If a chart is displaying counts then the app does not append base size - since it is apparent from the displayed data. If you select % Within Primary or % Distribution then the app will display the base sizes in a text box below the chart.
Hovering your mouse over chart columns will display the values of the series for that group.
Coming soon will be a feature where the user can select a slice of the data and create filters that can be used to explore a group
Pressing close will exit you from this view and back to the Static Data view. All charts have been saved unless they were discarded (using the trashcan icon).
