ChartLine™ August 2005

 

Welcome!

In this issue of ChartLine, the information e-newsletter from Visual Mining, we have new updates for all NetCharts products, a great technical tip for using NetCharts Designer to build bubble charts, a cool example of a stacked grouped bar chart, and a couple of stories showcasing how customers have used NetCharts products to build their business or increase company productivity.

ChartLine is designed to share knowledge for working with Visual Mining's NetCharts products, help you get things done faster, and guide you through new application ideas. We will publish one of these every so often to keep you up to date.

We invite you to tell us what you'd like to see in upcoming issues and we'll try to cover it for you - email chartline@visualmining.com. And if there's something we covered before, but you don't have that issue available, back issues of ChartLine are archived on the website.

Sincerely,
Lezlie Ramsey, Editor,
& The Visual Mining Team

Announcements

Take Advantage of Online Resources

If you haven't visited us lately, drop by and check it out!

* * * * *

Are You Current? V4.6 for all products now available!

Here are the latest product release versions:  

  • NetCharts® Server v4.6
  • NetCharts® Designer v4.6
  • NetCharts® Analytics v1.1 - NEW!
  • NetCharts® Pro v4.6
  • NetCharts® v4.6

Please note that the following products are no longer being offered for sale; however, we will still support them:

Cool Example: Grouped Stacked Bar Chart 

The Group Stack Bar Chart can provide an added layer of depth to your data visualization project.  These types of charts work best with data that can be extracted into a hierarchal -category structure. Proper data structure is the key to building a Group Stacked bar chart. The data can be manipulated at the database level before it is brought into Named Data Set (NDS), or afterwards using a Process Module.

 

Install Instructions:

  1. Import Project Archive Games0802051118.zip (right click link and select "Save Target As" to download) into NetCharts Designer
  2. Create on Excel ODBC System DSN pointing to ..Visual MiningNetCharts Designer 4.6workspace Gamesstatsheet.xls

The example uses shooting statistics from a basketball team over three games.  Graphically, we want to show total points broken down by player for each shooting category, grouped by the opponent.

 

 

The data is structured so all chart values can easily be extracted from the NDS. 

 

Values

Opponent  =“Bar Set Name”,

Player =“Bar Set Group”

2PT, 3PT and FT will each be a “Bar Set”

 

Labels

Opponent Name = “Bar Labels”

Category Labels =  “Group Stack Labels”

 

Legend
Player Name = “Legend Items”

Maxager Technology Renews Licensing of Visual Mining's NetCharts® Pro

Maxager's Profit Velocity® Solution Helps Finance, Marketing, and Sales Professionals Worldwide Uncover Profit Improvements Worth 3-5% of Revenue

Rockville , Maryland - June 8, 2005 - Visual Mining, Inc., a leading developer of reporting and data visualization solutions, today announced that Maxager Technology has renewed their licensing of NetCharts® Pro to provide interactive graphs for their Profit Velocity® Solution application.

"Maxager's Profit Velocity Solution displays its product and customer profitability charts online using NetCharts Pro. This tool gives our product superior charting functionality and a professional look and feel," said Zachary Mided, Vice President, Engineering and Operations for Maxager Technology. "NetCharts Pro helps our development and testing teams to be more productive, as they do not have to develop and test the charting engine. Equally important, Visual Mining's technical support is very good, responding to issues in a timely manner to help us achieve our 100% up-time goal."

Read the whole story at:
http://www.visualmining.com/company/pr060805.shtml

Technical Tip: Creating Bubble Charts with NetCharts Designer

Introduction
NetCharts Designer provides you with the tools to create many different types of data visualizations. Some charting components require a more stringent structure for your data and you must be conscious of this while working with these types of charts. The first 3 steps of 6 are below:

Creating a Bubble Chart
Bubble charts provide an excellent way to view data in three dimensions. In the following tutorial we will create a bubble chart that visualizes financial data by overlaying two datasets.

  1. Create a New Project
    Create a new project named BubbleProject.
  2. Create the Manual Dataset
    From the toolbar click on the Create a New Dataset wizard. Name your new dataset BubbleChartData, select Manual Data Entry from the Available Data Sources list, and click Next.



    You will be presented with a grid. Fill the grid with the following data and click Finish:

    Acutal 

    Budget

    Jan

    1

    50
    6000
    1
    50
    5000

    Feb

    2

    50
    4500
    2
    50
    5000

    Mar

    3

    50
    7000
    3
    50
    5000

    Apr

    4

    50
    4000
    4
    50
    5000


  3. Create the Bubble Chart
    Now that we have created our dataset the next step is to create the bubble chart. From the toolbar click on the Create a New Chart icon. Call it BubbleChart, select Bubble Chart for the type and click finish.

Get the complete 6-step Bubble Chart tutorial.

Intermountain Health Care: Improving the quality of medical treatment by leveraging contemporary technology

IHC has a mature and established data warehouse. They needed a tool to help them more efficiently and effectively develop interactive analytical applications that leverage the information available in our enterprise data warehouse. The Data Warehouse staff were receiving many requests from various business units to build performance management tools such as scorecards and dashboards to help them better manage their area of the business. They needed a development tool to accelerate the development of these types of applications.

Intermountain Health Care EDW Load Job Tracking chart

Figure 1: The Enterprise Data Warehouse tracks the number and duration of current jobs running on the data warehouse.

IHC’s Data Warehouse management identified over 20 commercial products when they commenced their evaluation and selection project. After a thorough evaluation and benchmark with a short list of three, they ultimately selected NetCharts Reporting Suite for the following reasons:

  • Price - NetCharts was a good value;
  • Openness - Java-based development environment;
  • Customer satisfaction - we contacted three existing
    customers of NetCharts and received very complimentary references based on tool functionality and vendor
    responsiveness to customer enhancement and support requests;
  • Flexibility - some of the other tools we evaluated required the implementation of a “heavy” quality improvement methodology, such as Six Sigma or Balanced Scorecard. We wanted a tool flexible enough to adapt to our own quality improvement methodology and reporting methods - and NetCharts provided the most options without investing in more infrastructure.

Read the whole story at:
http://www.visualmining.com/customers/IHC-success-story.shtml

Happy charting!


Visual Mining's
News & Tips Letter
AUGUST 2005

IN THIS ISSUE:

  1. Announcements
  2. Cool Example: Stacked Grouped Bar Chart
  3. Maxager Technology Renews Licensing of Visual Mining's NetCharts Pro 
  4. Technical Tip:Creating Bubble Charts With NetCharts Designer
  5. Customer Case   Study: Intermountain Health Care 

You are receiving this
e-newletter because you subscribed to ChartLine on our website, downloaded one of Visual Mining's products, or are a customer.

Send comments and questions to chartline@visualmining.com

NetCharts and Visual Mining are registered trademarks of Visual Mining, Inc. All other product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.

ChartLine Copyright © 2004
Visual Mining, Inc. All rights reserved.

Visual Mining, Inc.
15825 Shady Grove Rd, #20
Rockville, MD 20850
301.795.2200
www.visualmining.com
info@visualmining.com


NetCharts and Visual Mining are registered trademarks of Visual Mining, Inc.  All other product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.

ChartLine © 2004 Visual Mining, Inc.  All rights reserved.