Many managers and consumers need methods to quickly see the state of their business, including Key Performance Indictors (KPI). In addition, they may need to quickly spot changes in these values over time and also whether the values are trending up or down.
This can be done in TIBCO Spotfire 4.0 using the new Graphical Table visualization.
Graphical Tables are a new visualization provided in TIBCO Spotfire 4.0 which is designed to provide information at a glance. The Graphics Table is a table-based visualization that has a categorical row axis which defines the rows and a collection of 'miniature Visualizations' that defines the columns of the table. Supported miniature visualizations are Sparklines, Icons, and Calculated Values.
To see this in action, let’s assume we are managing a weight loss program which measures the participants’ weights over time. Below shows the data in a Line Chart:
Now let’s see what we can do with the new Graphical Table.
First we need to add the ‘Participant’ column to the Row’s Axis.
Then on the Columns’ Axis, we start by adding a Sparkline.
The Sparkline can be configured by clicking on the ‘Settings’ button with the Sparkline column highlighted. In our example, we put Months on the X-Axis and then we put the Sum(Weight in kg) expression on the Y-Axis.
The resulting Sparkline column is shown below:
Next we may want to display whether or not participants in the study are trending up or down, or whether there has been no change.
We can add another miniature visualization into the Graphical Table using the ’Icon’ option:
To specify which Icons show up, we can use unique values in a column, or an expression. In this case, we will need to use a custom expression. We will enter the following expression in the ’Calculate icons using’ field.
(ValueForMin([Date],[Weight in kg]) - ValueForMax([Date],[Weight in kg]))
We will then add rules, which are similar to the conditional coloring rules, to set specific icons and colors for Greater than 0, Equal to 0, and Less than 0.
Next we may want to display each participant’s percent change. For this, we will use the ‘Calculated Value’ option.
After we add the Calculated Value, we can set the value’s expression using the ‘Settings’ button. The expression used is :
(ValueForMin([Date],[Weight in kg]) - ValueForMax([Date],[Weight in kg])) / ValueForMin([Date],[Weight in kg])
Finally, we can then set the formatting for this to be a Percentage. We will also add a Rule to set the color all values that are Less than 0 to be red.
