From Heat Map Charts to Color Scale Legends, Experience Dundas BI Version 7

For more details on Dundas BI Version 7, check out these blogs:

 

Arthur C. Clarke once said, “The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible”. Dundas BI currently pushes the limits of what it means to be flexible and has even been ranked #1 for Flexibility by BARC’s The BI Survey 19.

Even with this award, we have no plans of slowing down as we are constantly pushing to see what is possible. Our objective is to achieve an impossible level of flexibility. Now that’s possible!

In fact, we’re continuously innovating, and with the release of the latest iteration of our software, we expect to set ourselves even further apart from the competition.

Let’s look at some exciting new visualization-based features in Dundas BI 7 that will help take your dashboards to the next level.

 

Heat Map Chart

This chart is something that you can create with a few simple clicks, making this complex visualization much more accessible to all users. If you’re not familiar with this chart type, here is an example to help understand how it might be used, and how you can derive value from it.

In this Sales example, the potential upcoming revenue has been bucketed into different stages as a deal moves from a lead or prospect to a closed sale. On the bottom axis, you can see these eight stages with the Sales reps positioned along the left axis.

The purpose of this chart is to quickly uncover three things:

  1. What the total health of your sales funnel is – the greener the better!

  1. What the health of individual Sales people’s funnels is – Go Brittania, she’s killing it across the board!

  1. Compare the funnels of different Sales people to help with coaching and resource alignment.

This is a very helpful visualization when you’re looking to understand multiple variables as well. This is just one example, but there are many ways that you can use a chart type such as this.

 

Color Scale Legend

Now that we have a neat new visualization that users color to present data, wouldn’t it be neat if there was an easy way to understand what those colors meant? We agree! This is why we have included a new specialized option in the Legend to deal with Color Scales.

See how the color range is shown across the legend to help users understand exactly how the data is distributed?

This new legend capability is also very helpful for other color-based visualizations like the Tree Map, or the Map when using Symbols or Shape coloring.

Anytime you have a visualization that uses color ranges, this will be a helpful option to give your users more clarity into what they are seeing.

 

Relative Font Sizes

Phones, tablets, and laptops are everything nowadays, and chances are you’re reading this blog on a small mobile device rather than on a traditional desktop.

Dashboards are continuously required to change and be responsive to certain device sizes, but the last thing you want are fonts that are either not changing to your needs or becoming too small. To help with creating more responsive dashboards, we have added the ability to better control your font sizes as you view content across large and small devices.

The new Responsive Font Sizing Strength property adjusts the degree of the changes in font sizes for relative fonts when the dashboard is changing sizes during viewing. It is represented by a number between 1 and 100.

A small number will result in small font size changes, while a large number results in large font size changes. Then all you need to do is use an ‘em’ unit of measure when setting your font sizes to have fonts automatically scale.

This is a must-have for any responsive dashboard.

 

Default Themes

With 2020 fast approaching, and the start of a new decade on the horizon (where did the time go?), it’s high time some of the default themes being used for visualizations in Dundas BI get a refresh. With Dundas BI version 7, we’ve changed the default themes such that your visualizations go from this:

To this:

But don’t worry. If you loved the old themes, they are still available, and you can certainly revert to that style.

 

Dundas BI 7 is here, but that doesn’t mean the innovation is coming to a stop. Our platform is constantly moving forward, evolving, and bringing you cutting-edge capabilities to handle your data analytics. This blog offers just a glimpse into this powerful, new version. There’s plenty of new features and capabilities in this release and even more on the horizon. I hope you’re as excited as I am!

Interested in seeing what else Dundas BI 7 has to offer? Schedule a personal live demo with a Dundas Solution Architect or start your free evaluation of Dundas BI 7 today! With Dundas BI, the possibilities are infinite.

About the Author

Jeff Hainsworth

Jeff Hainsworth is a Senior Solutions Architect at Dundas Data Visualization with over a decade and a half of experience in Business Intelligence. He has a passion for building, coding and everything visual – you know, shiny things! Check out "Off the Charts... with Jeff", his platform for great content on all things analytics, data visualizations, dashboards, and business intelligence. There’s something for everyone!

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