Chart Panel (Worksheet)
The Chart panel (the third of the four alternatives on the central panel of the Worksheet footer) is designed to give users full design control over the values and labels used for graphing. These choices apply to any of the three graph styles supported.
In other words, while the style-specfic controls (far right panel) offer customization of a graph once it's created, the Chart panel is where you can decide what goes into the making of graphs in the first place.
Often you won't need to use this feature, because Access ELF does a good job of pre-selecting the values and labels for any given situation. But when fine-tuning is needed, this option gives you total control. You can specify not just which fields should be graphed, but the order in which they should appear. This can be important for multi-value graphs (such as those based on crosstabs) since larger series may obscure smaller ones when positioned in front.
A simple example of how this feature can be used follows from the question "Show the price and category of each product." Let's start by selecting the M5 (Microsoft Graph 5) radio button and see how Access ELF handles this. The SQL generated displays three fields, UnitPrice, CategoryName and ProductName. When we click the Split button, a graph of UnitPrices is displayed, each price labelled with the corresponding Category and ProductName.
This may be more information than we need to see in this particular graph. To gain display space for our graph, we can drop the CategoryName. However, the Chart controls work not by specifying what we don't want -- but what we do. This is easier than it sounds because Access ELF already shows you the choices it's made when designing the default graph. In this case, opening the Chart pane by clicking on Chart shows that UnitPrice has been chosen as the only graphable value (left column) while both CategoryName and ProductName (appended together, in that order) have been used as the label for each data point.
We can add fields by clicking on their headers in the Worksheet, but in this case we want to remove the CategoryName field. That's accomplished by double-clicking its entry in the Chart pane. Once we have the choices we want, clicking the Graph Selected Columns button (or flipping out and back into graph mode) redraws the chart.
Notice that you can sort the graph on any variable, including ones that don't appear in the graph. That's because the graph appears in the order of the records in the Worksheet. Sort the Worksheet by Category and the graph immediately redisplays in that order -- even though Category is no longer shown as a label. (Be careful, though. If you sort on Category by first clicking its header, then sorting, you'll be adding CategoryName back into the graph. The proper way to do this is to select the column by placing the cursor on a data cell, then using a sort button.)
To change the order of field names within a label, or to change the order of values in relation to each other (in multi-value graphs), you must delete choices from the top or middle of the list, and re-add them at the bottom. Another trick for quickly demoting an entry is to highlight it, then right-click. This swaps it into the opposite panel. Right-clicking it again shifts it back to the bottom of the original list. You can also reposition the columns of the grid in the order you want, clear any "leftover" ordering in the
For an example of using the Chart control to reposition values in a multi-value graph, see the example of scaling the Discount field to the Quantity series.
The Chart lists also give you pinpoint control over the shape of any crosstab graph. For an example of how powerful the Worksheet controls can be, try the question "Compare the total quantity for each category by lastname." The crosstab generated is impressive enough, and the graphs (in MS Graph 6 and Pinnacle/BPS styles) are excellent. The astonishing part is that individual employees can be removed or added to this graph, by clicking their names in the value (left-hand) list. Excised names can be restored by clicking the crosstab header. Reordering is done as descibed above.
If the categories -- not the employee names -- were to be excised selectively, we could force the crosstab to appear flipped along the diagonal by asking: "Compare the total quantity for each category by lastname down." (or equally, "Show total quantity with category across and lastname down", "Compare the quantities giving lastname with category across" etc). Now the CategoryNames appear individually in the left-hand value box, ready to be removed or inserted. Note that the Microsoft Graph 6 series checkbox will rotate a crosstab graph 90 degrees, providing an additional layer of control.
Another, possibly even easier way of graphing isolated sections of a crosstab is to simply highlight them and then click the Graph Selected Columns button. This technique lets you focus on any contiguous area of the pivot table. For instance, to select individual columns and rows simultaneously, use the click method to select column headings, then highlight any set of contiguous rows. Clicking Graph will chart the intersection.
Last Updated: March, 2002