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  Modeling three items in a stacked bar
Posted by Gordon on Apr-01-2011 08:59
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I have used this component for ages - love it.
Question for the experts.

I have to implement a chart that models a number of incidents over a year. There are three categories - important, serious and 'someone is going to front up to CEO".

These need to be displayed as a stacked bar chart showing trends by month across the year. But for each category the bar needs to show the number of events in the month as well as the total duration of that category in the month. So I was considering a 3D barchart where the height of each category showed the count, and width of the bar showed the duration.

Or there may be a better way to present the data - open to suggestions.

Can anyone help and advise please

Thanks and regards

  Re: Modeling three items in a stacked bar
Posted by Peter Kwan on Apr-02-2011 03:12
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Hi Gordon,

For your case, if you are using the width to show the duration, does it mean each bar segment may have a different width? This type of 3D bar chart is not supported in ChartDirector.

For this type of chart, the only method I can think of is to use a 2D bubble chart with rectangular bubbles. In ChartDirector, the width and height of the rectangular bubbles can be configured independently. If you put the bubbles one on top of the other, they will be stacked like a stacked bar, but with each segment of different width.

However, my personal opinion is that the above chart may be difficult to read by the user. There is no axis scale for the user to easily read the duration from width of the bar. Whereas it is easy to compare the duration of one segment with the different of a different segment in the same bar, it is hard to compare the total duration of one bar with that of the next bar.

May be you can consider to simply plot two stacked bars for each month using a "Multi-Stacked Bar Chart". One of the stacked bar can show the number of events, and the other bar can show the duration. They can be use two different y-axes. You may use visual hints so that the users can easily see the two bars are representing different aspects of the same categories. For example, one of the bars can use "red/green/blue", and the other bar can use "light red/light green/light blue". Or the two bars can use exactly the same color scheme but distinguished by bar shape (eg. one rectangular, one cylindrical).

Hope this can help.

Regards
Peter Kwan