Custom charts and chart customizations

Feature Suggestions
#1

Hi all,

Revamping our visualization system is one of the top priority in this year.

We are looking at adding custom charts (create new charts that do not exist in Holistics) and more chart customizations (tweaking the rotation of axis, changing table column size…), so we’d love to have more feedback and sharing from you:

  • What’s your preferred experience when it comes to creating a custom chart? Writing a DSL or point-and-click interface?
  • How important is custom charts and chart customizations for your company/ for your reporting need?
  • What’s your use case? How are you going to create custom charts? What charts would that be?
Sunburst Visualization
Holistics February 2022 Product Updates
#2

@Alex_H I believed you used to suggest this to us right?

#3

Chart Types

I would say there are a few key ones missing…

  • Histogram (line & bar)
  • Box Plot
  • Small Multiple (aka Panel Charts, facted chart etc) - basically a grid of identical charts based on a categorical value
  • Waterfall chart

Beyond these, I would suggest then focusing on enhancing existing charts. Many things here, but eg…

  • Custom fonts, formats, scales, add/remove grids, trend lines etc

As for point & click vs DML, I think allowing point & click is important for users - not all users creating charts will be comfortable working in a non point & click manner. But being able to directly edit the definitions, and therefore store as code will of course be very valuable. Much the same as the model creation is today in AML.

5 Likes
#4

Thanks David!

How do you contemplate the difference in experience between supporting Custom charts, which will help you create many other charts vs directly supporting each specific chart? Imo, although custom charts are powerful, they are too generic to be simple enough, even with a point-and-click interface.

1 Like
#5

Interesting topic!

Personally I don’t see the direct need for custom visualisations right now. I have worked with other tools where they are created, and I have never been in a company that has created them. However, with a large enough community some interesting ones can be created.

I think it would be best initially to get some key missing charts directly supported in the tool, before branding out to custom ones.

As @david-ri mentions above, there are key ones that are missing that would add a lot of benefit to any team reporting.

The additional enhancements are also key, especially for myself and the team e.g. we really do want to see the trend line functionality added to understand our metrics better.

For the development of the custom charts, I agree point and click would be awesome with the ability to dive into code if required.

4 Likes
#6

I’d love custom labelling to be possible. E.g. when making a pie chart, I’d like to be able to rename each of the segments.

1 Like
#7

Hi Sophie, welcome to the community! I’ve noted your request for our Product team to improve the experience. Thanks!

#8

Thanks Craig for the inputs. Any idea which “key missing charts” we should be looking at?

Noted on the trend line, will let my team know about this!

#9

Hi Tuan,

The charts I feel would be great additions are (and similar to @david-ri list):

  • Box plot
  • Histogram
  • Waterfall
  • Error Bars (like line chart but provides a box plot at each section)
  • A more generic sounding Heatmap (not all heat maps are used for customer retention)

I think that would probably cover most use cases I can see being required.

4 Likes
#10

Sorry @tuan.nguyen missed this originally.

I agree with a lot of the points other posters made here - some additional core visualisations would be fantastic - particularly the histogram.

I’d also add that a Sankey diagram would be very welcome.

4 Likes
#11

Great to see you are working on charts. When it comes to my use case, the current set of available charts is enough for me. But I would love to see more customization options, such as additional metrics shown on the tooltip, retention chart color, showing percentage values rounded to 2 digits, additional currencies (not only $), and other things mentioned by the people in this thread :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#12

There is one simple improvement i’d like to suggest - for readers who read left to right, the expectation is that the legend order from left to right will be reflected in the legend stacking order from bottom to top (e.g. 1, 2,3,4,5 would stack from the bottom 1,2,3,4,5). Currently stacking goes from 5 at the bottom to 1 at top. There seems to be no way to order the legend.

1 Like
#13

Thanks Monika!

Well noted on the additional metrics shown on the tooltip & retention chart color.

Regarding these two:

  • showing percentage values rounded to 2 digits
  • additional currencies

Actually, we have already supported them. You can check out our documentation: Formatting Data | Holistics Docs

#14

Thanks mate for noticing this! Lemme add “change order of legend in the stacked bar chart to ascending from bottom to top” to our backlog!

1 Like
#15

Another small improvement would be to disable connecting lines between data points in the combination chart type.

1 Like
#16

Hi!

Another chart I really appreciate is a cumulative growth chart. So we can see total of a metric on a given day. E.g. if we were interested in seeing total sales so far each month, where the x axis would be date and the y axis would be the total sales on that date.

To echo Craig above - error bars would be super useful!

Thanks!

1 Like
#17

Hi Sophie, I believe you are referring to this feature (which we have released) right? :point_right: Launched: Running Total (Cumulative Sum, Avg, Min, Max)