Section 19: Configuring a Histogram Chart

NOTE: A Histogram is a binning of categories. In chart form, it shows how many members are contained in groups of number ranges.

When Completed

Your NetCharts Designer perspective will appear like this:
 
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Getting Started

Start by closing any open editors. Go to NetCharts Designer’s File menu and select the Close All option.
 
Next, create a new project named HistogramChartProject.

Create the Datasets

From the toolbar click on the Create a New Dataset wizard. Name your new dataset data, select Hypersonic SQL from the Data Sources list, and click Next.
 
Enter the following query:

SELECT LOCATION, ACTUAL FROM COSTDATA WHERE LOCATION <> ‘All’

Click Finish.
 
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Create the Histogram Chart

Now that we have created our dataset the next step is to create the Histogram chart. From the toolbar click on the Create a New Chart icon. Call it chart, select Histogram for the type
 
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and click Finish.
 
In the Histogram Chart Features group, set the Histogram Scale: Min: to 0, and the Max: to 250000. Set the Histogram Bin: Type drop down menu to By Width and the Bin Size edit box to be 50000.

NOTE: The bottom 5 drop down menus control the way in which the Histogram chart functions: The Histogram Type can be configured to function by Number, Percentage or Probability. The Histogram Scale – Min and Max regulate the range of numbers included in the calculation, and the Histogram Bin can be set to Auto, By Number or By Width. By Number sets the number of bins. By width sets the range of values contained within each bin. Here, the chart is grouping transaction data by size, counting the number of transactions in each of 8dollar value bins.

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Click the Data Source Binding tab, select Bar Values from the hierarchy on the left, and select data.ndx as the data source. Click the Select Rows and Select Columns buttons.
 
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Select Legend Items from the hierarchy on the left. Select data.ndx as the data source. Click the Deselect Rows, and Select Columns buttons.
 
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Under the Presentation tab, open the Axes group from the hierarchy on the left, and select the Bottom Axes. Under the Tic Labels group, create a style called Angle20. Set the Font to an 11 point, Arial, set the Angle spinner to 20, and set the Align drop down to Right. Click OK.
 
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Select the Grids selection from the hierarchy on the left. Add a new grid, and select the both style from the Grid Style drop down menu.
 
Select the Legend tree hierarchy and check the Show Legend option. Set the Legend location to the top of the chart.
 
Your chat will appear like this:
 
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