Finally it’s here! FileMaker Pro Version 11 was announced Tuesday March 9^th, and the flagship feature of FileMaker 11 is the new Charting objects. I wanted to talk about how the new charting system works, and also some generalized rules when using the charts.

First thing we should go over is the different types of charts available. There are Bar, Horizontal Bar, Line, Area and Pie Charts available for use. The charts will work with Found Sets of Data, Related Data, and Delimited Data within one record. Some limitations exist with the Pie Chart, which can only show one set of data. If you plan on using the Pie Chart with related data, keep in mind that the data set definition for the chart will allow for more than one field; however FileMaker will only chart the first field set, disregarding any others defined.

I won’t go into too much detail, but here are some ideas for charting and how to effectively use them. Create a chart for a found set of records in the same table.

I have setup a Sales Reps demo file that shows the use of all of these charts, and in this file I have 2 tables; Sales and Sales Reps. The solution is simple, each table has minimal data but I have a relationship setup for Sales Reps to Sales by the RepID.

The first chart I want to demo is the Found Count Chart. I am looking at the Sales Table and I am searching by Rep for all Sales. I have built a simple chart to display the results.

The found count will be the number of bars you see in the chart, in this case 3 found records. The setup for this was pretty simple; I used the amount of sales as the Y Axis, and the Date of Sales for the X Axis.

You will need to be mindful when using this type of chart if you view all the records in the database and the set is very large, the chart will display that.

This could potentially wreak havoc with the database system when we are working with large sets of records (think 100,000+ records).

Note*** You may want to create a process for the search/display of the records and the chart. If the Chart is seen, it will start to process the found set of records.

Another option for building a chart is using the Related Set of Records option. The benefits of this type of chart are that it will allow you to centralize the chart to a specific record and its related records, allow you to display aggregate values in the chart, and when combined with relationship filters, can allow for dynamic charting.

The chart will reside on the Sales Reps page, along with the Date Range Global fields.

As a user selects different Sales Reps and different date ranges, the object will process the appropriate data and chart out the set of related records for you.

The Relationship Definition:

The Chart Definition:

From here we can change data sets on the fly, and perhaps use the charts as a live reporting tool, quick data analysis, or anything else we can come up with for dynamic use of a chart.

The last type of chart definition available uses delimited data from a single record in the chart. An example would be displaying different sales prices, profit vs. sales costs, or perhaps charting feedback scores from QA inquiries. Whatever the case may be, there are some rules for using delimited data sets.

First we need to understand what delimited sets are, and what they will represent when charted in FileMaker.

Take a look at these sets:

As you can see, I have arranged my data into a columnar type of system, where each row constitutes a set of data (record), and each column contains different attributes (fields). By arranging my data in this manner, I can report on a series of data for one record. This is very similar to working with related record sets except that with the delimited sets we can use scripts to define these sets of data, allowing us to in essence report on anything we want for a given record, related or not.

Chart Displayed:

Chart Definition:

There are some more advanced ways of using charts, especially when dealing with sub summary reporting and script driven data sets. So we can see some examples, take a look at a Pie Chart sub summary report. We will search for a data range, and sort the records by Sales Rep name.

Again there are rules for this type of charting, where the chart should generally go into a Grand Summary Part because we want to report on the full set of records and not a sub summarized set of records (grouped records). There are certain rules in place for using these types of charts, and if records are not sorted correctly or you put the chart in the wrong place you can see some really crazy results.

I hope this helps to answer some questions about using the Charts, and what they are capable of. If you are looking for more information you can contact Anvil Dataworks or sign up for training. Stay tuned for more…

Demo File is available for download – Sales.Zip