In of my previous blogs a wrote about
dashboards design rules and the do's and don'ts. Easy readable charts are essential in the success of your reports. When building reports you have a lot of different chart types you can choose for your reports. By default you can use a bar chart of a line chart. When comparing figures for instance current year with prevoius year of current year with the budget. You can use a standard bar chart like this one:
However the graph is a little bit busy to read. Using the combination of a bar for the current year and line graph for the comparing previous year will make the chart easier to read. Like this:
How to do this:
- Open the report in Business Intelligent Development Studio (BIDS).
- Double click on the bars in the chart.
- Select the Bar of previous year in the Chart data window. In my example RevenueYTD_1.
- Change chart type
- Select the line type you want. That's all you need to do.
How to create running totals?
- Double click on the bar in the chart.
- Select the Bar of current year in the Chart data window.
- Series properties.
- Press on the expression button for the value field.
- Use next expression: =Runningvalue(Sum(Fields!Previous_Year.Value),SUM,"RevenueYTD_YTDPY")
- RevenueYTD_YTDPY is the name of my dataset. The column name used is 'Previous_Year'
- Do the same for the line graph.
- That's all you have to do.
Enjoy it to build nice and easy readable reports.
