Advanced .NET Data Visualization for reporting

Most BI tools support some sort of basic data visualization features. For example, you can take tabular data and convert it into charts, trend lines and basic conditional formatting.

Advanced data visualization for business reporting goes beyond simple charts and includes:

• Spark lines, a highly compact trend line so you can fit multiple trend lines in a small region
• Bullet graphs that includes target indicators within bar charts
• Heat maps that display a set of variables as slightly differentiating colors

Data Dynamics Reports enables .NET developers to embed these advanced data visualization features into their applications with minimal effort.

Bullet Graphs
The bullet graph replaces dashboard gauges and meters as they implicate a number of major issues:

1. They display too little information.
2. They take too much space.
3. They are overloaded with distracting decoration details, which carry no valuable message.

The bullet graph overcomes these display issues.
Examples of bullet graphs are:






Spark Lines

The Sparkline contributes to a more unbiased data analysis as it clearly demonstrates general changes in time along with local details. Consuming not more than 14 letterspaces of the horizontal length and being as high as the surrounding text, sparklines can be easily included in dashboards, reports, and other documents.
Data Dynamics Reports provides a user with several sparkline types:

Line
Line sparkline is widely used in financial and economic data analysis and is based on a continuous flow of data. The currency exchange rates, changes in price are the examples of application of this type of sparklines.



Area
The Area sparkline is similar to the Line sparkline but visually you see the space under the line as shaded.


Stacked Bar
The Stacked bar sparkline is presented as a horizontal bar with different segment lengths marked by distinct color hues. The Stacked bar illustrates how the various segments of a part-to-whole relationship correspond to one another; the largest segment represents the highest value and the change in brightness indicates a new value on a scale.


Column
The Column sparkline is used for sports scores, cash register receipts, and other cases where previous values and the current value do not closely influence one another. In this case you are dealing with discrete data points, and not a continuous flow of data as in the Line sparkline.


Whisker
The Whisker sparkline is typically used in win/loss/tie or true/false scenarios. This type is similar to the Column sparkline, but it renders a tie (0 value) in a different manner.



Color Scales (to generate Heat Maps)
Color scale maps a numeric value onto a range of colors, reducing the complexity of dealing with a large number of discrete data elements.



Icon Sets
Icon Sets distill information into status flags and corresponding images, based on either absolute or calculated values.



Data Dynamics Reports comes with standard icon sets.



Custom Icon sets
Custom icon sets must conform to the following rules.

1. The format must be of a type that is handled by the .NET framework.
2. The size of the strip must be 120 x 24 pixels.
3. Each image must be 24 x 24 pixels in size.
4. There must be no more than five images in the strip.
5. If there are fewer than five images in the strip, there must be blank spaces in the image to fill in.

More information is available in the product documentation.