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Solved: Charts displaying too many categories

Solved: Charts displaying too many categories

Ever wanted to display your data in a chart but found that there were just too many categories? The good news is that Yellowfin introduced new functionality that can solve this headache.

In previous versions of Yellowfin when you created for example a bar chart, ALL of the categories were squeezed in to fit onto your chart axis. Even if this meant that at the end the chart will become unreadable. Below you will see an example of this dilemma:

Chart before Trim Display

Fortunately, Yellowfin introduced the “Trim Display” option in the Series settings in the chart builder in version 8.01. This allows you to limit the number of categories displayed on your chart. In other words, you can now reduce the categories based on the value of a metric.

This functionality is available in bar, column, area, line and auto charts.

See the example below:

  1. Create a new report based on the Ski Team view.

    Create new report

  2. Add the Camp Name and Invoiced Amount fields to the Columns Area.

    The Invoiced Amount field has a Sum aggregation applied to it by default. This changes the results of the report by summing up all the invoiced records to give totals, rather than each unique invoiced record.

    Columns Area

  3. Proceed to the Charts step.

  4. Set the Horizontal Axis to Camp Name, the Vertical Axis to Sum Invoiced Amount.

    Chart Settings

  5. You will now have a column chart showing the Invoiced amount by Camp Name. Previously you had the problem that this chart is almost impossible to read – there are just too many categories (camps in this case).

    Too many categories on chart

  6. Click on the Series icon at the top of the screen.

    In the next steps we will be limiting the categories to display in an attempt to make the chart more readable.

    Series Settings

  7. Select the Camp Name category.

    Camp Name Category

  8. Click on the Trim Display tab and enable “Trim Values”.

    This will allow us limit the number of categories to display based on the value of a metric.

    Enable Trim Values

  9. Select “Series: Sum Invoiced Amount” in the Metric to Trim by drop-down field. The chart dimensions are ranked according to the value of this metric field.

    Leave the rest of the settings unchanged.

    Trim Values Settings

    See the table below for a detailed explanation of the other settings on this tab.

    Trim Top or Bottom Specify whether dimensions are removed from the top or bottom.
    Top N: Display the top N dimensions in the chart, where N is “Dimension Display Count” value.
    Bottom N: Display the bottom N dimensions in the chart, where N is the “Dimension Display Count” value.

    Dimension Display Count The number of dimensions to keep in the chart. The chart will only display this many dimensions, removing all others.

    Metric Value Type Choose to ignore the negative sign of all values, so that they are treated as positive values when the chart is ranked according to values.
    Relative: Treat all negative values as negative.
    Absolute: All negative values will be treated as positive.

    Show Other Dimension Enable this to display the total of all other values into a separate category on the chart.


  10. Your chart will now only display the top 10 camp names.

    Please note that this is only limiting the categories in the chart – all values will still be displayed in the tabular report.

    Chart with trimmed dimensions