Not A Good Idea: Using unusually long bottom axis labels can pose a problem where they overlap each other completely, making the labels unreadable.

By default the popup labels (Dwell or Active Label) for both Bars and Lines are enabled when you hover over them in a Combo chart. However, you might have a particular requirement where you need to switch off the Active Labels for the Bars but need the Active Labels to remain for the Line data points.

Not A Good Idea: While using Analogous colors that sit next to each other look nice, colors used this way are not very functional. For example, it’s nearly impossible to identify a specific color of a label shown. If using a Legend, how do you easily identify which Label matches which slice?

Visual Mining product’s core rendering engines share the same Chart Definition Language (CDL) language. While CDL is a text based language, NetCharts Designer offers a user interface with wizards and menus to design and style the charts, removing the need to learn CDL.

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: This example shows a chart with different fonts and font sizes together with a harsh gridline that makes it distracting and disrupting. The design pulls the eye away from the information the chart is attempting to show.

You may have read about CDL on our site and in the documentation and wondered what it is and stands for. Our Chart Definition Language or CDL is a collection of plain text parameters that describe a chart.

Not A Good Idea: Keeping the chart layout as vertical where the bars stand upright can be a problem if you have very long labels. As the example demonstrates below, the long labels overlap each other, get cut off and makes the chart hard to read.

Not A Good Idea: Adding excessive 3D depth on a chart will make it difficult to accurately read the true value. For example on this Combo chart, the bar value of Label 1 is 10 but at a quick glance the value appears to be 15 due to the depth angle of the bars.

You may have a requirement where you need to show the individual values of each segment in a stacked bar instead of the totals.

The CDL parameter StackLabel offers control over the display of the segment bar values and the value in the active label hover popups for stacked bar charts. Options allow for either the aggregate value of the stack or the individual stack segment value to be presented in the label.