Maybe you have a chart template such as a BarChart or ComboChart that is a couple years old and the bars doesn’t pop or look as stylish as you’d wish it would. Your chart may look similar to this BarChart below:

Maybe you have a chart template such as a BarChart or ComboChart that uses the old 3D feature on the bars. Or maybe your chart is a couple years old and doesn’t pop or look as stylish as you’d wish it would. If so the chart may look similar to this BarChart.

In this blog post we will take a closer look at some best practice recommendations to optimize your chart visualizations when using Bar charts. Using NetCharts, the style and look of each chart type such as Bar charts can be customized using our Chart Definition Laungauge (CDL) and its functionality controlled.

While every element of charts produced by NetCharts can be customized and controlled, with countless combinations allowing you to build a chart exactly the way you want, the chart itself consists of many parts that are shared and used across the different chart types.

In this blog post we will guide you through the simple steps of enabling the required CDL parameters in your chart template using NetCharts Designer. Including these parameters to any chart type that has the Legend enabled, will allow you to interact with the chart by hovering the pointer over the legend items and the corresponding lines, bars or slices will change colors.

Did you know that with just a couple simple steps you can add legend interactivity to your charts that are supported in both raster and vector image formats? In this blog we will guide you through the steps of adding the required CDL parameters in a chart template and the required API’s for your chart application.

Not A Good Idea: Keeping all datasets of different scales within a single axis can cause issues when there’s wide gap between the values. For example in an auto scaled chart where the data values of the blue line are between 377 to 958, it can be hard to accurately read the lower values of the green line which are between 2 to 7.

Not A Good Idea: Placing the Legend on either sides of the chart when it contains long legend item labels can cause problems as shown below. The long text labels push the bars which scales the chart content to become smaller. In turn it causes the bottom labels to overlap each other making them hard to read.

Sparklines and Sparkbars are very small charts without the usual axes, tic lines or grids. This chart type is intended to show a trend in a clear and simple way in the text they’re part of.

Not A Good Idea: Displaying multiple datasets in rows is a problem as the first data set will cover the second dataset.