Monday, February 20, 2012

MS RS Reportviewer, sparklines and bullet graphs in the report.

Hello All,

For a new reporting project compact we are using MS Reporting Services and hosting the report in an ASP.NET reportviewer.

"Tufte-like" and very clean, simple data visualizations as sparklines and bullet graphs have become a requirement.

We've had some success redering these in ASP but it's become necessary to render them in the reports themselves and we have not found a good way to do it.
Even third party charting products do not seem to support RS very much, one that does requires it on top of analysis services and their sparklines are actually defined in the KPI-s, but we are not using AS.

Have any of you had reports inspired by Tufte or Few and implemented it,
how did you manage it?

as always, your help is greatly appreciated!

Edward Tufte reports!!! Great way to go!

I did some a while back - basically, take a regular column chart and strip away everything from it:

Chart Area - no border/line, no fill
Plot Area - no border/line, no fill
Axis - no labels, no scales, no tickmarks
No Legend
The Palette doesn't have enough options, but the default is best

If you are doing comparisons against, say regions or products, create a separate column chart for each. Keep them the same scale, and lined up (stacked).

You really can do a lot of nice Sparklines using SSRS.

Good luck.

No comments:

Post a Comment