THE BURNINGSUIT BLOG

Horizontal Line & Vertical Line Scaffolds Before we delve into the rather obscure world of Scaffolds, let's remind ourselves of what we know so far about how Charticulator lays out a chart. If you've read my blog post "Charticulator Explained #5" on Plot Segment Layouts you will know that there are two key drivers in the layout of the chart; fields bound to the axes and sub-layouts. So for instance, we will get different layouts if we bind the Year… Read More

Guides, Guide Coordinators & Anchoring. Have you been wondering why elements of your Charticulator chart won't stay where you put them? If the answer to this is "yes" then you need to read this post. You see, what you probably haven't understood is that for anything placed on the canvas or in the glyph pane to stop wandering around, they must be anchored to a guide. This can be one of the default guides or it can be a guide… Read More

Scales & Legends. The problem with attempting to explain how Charticulator works is that there's a frustrating "chicken and egg" scenario. To understand topic "A", you need to know about topic "B" but to understand topic "B", you need to know about topic "A". So in other words, you need to already have some knowledge of each topic before we can attempt to explain more. This is why in this post, we're going to re-visit ground some of which we've… Read More

Charticulator Expressions. In this post we take a break from designing charts and instead take a detailed look at the expressions used by Charticulator when you bind data to an attribute. I'm talking about this type of thing:- I'm also going to attempt to explain Charticulator's rather unusual numeric formatting method where you edit characters inside those curly brackets. It's a syntax known as "d3-format". Have you ever heard of it? No? Well, neither had I nor indeed have any… Read More

Numeric Axes, Tick Marks & Tick Data. If you've read my previous blog post you'll know that with Charticulator you can use two categorical axes and hopefully this has inspired you to build more adventurous visuals. To entice you to carry on reading my series of posts, I keep holding out a "carrot", insisting that you can do a whole load of things in Charticulator that you can't do in Power BI visuals. The "stick" is that to be able… Read More

Using Two Categorical Axes. In my very first post on Charticulator, I urged you to forget everything you currently know about creating conventional charts. Instead to think in terms of designing a representation of your data, where you're no longer restrained by the number of axes, categories and values you want to represent. Yet so far in this series of blog posts, we've been very unambitious in our chart designs. All the charts we've created have been variations on standard… Read More

2D Region Plot Segments Part 2 – Sorting, Spacing, Aligning etc. In my last blog post, we delved into the mind-bending world of plot segment sub-layouts. Also at long last, we learned how to build a simple bar chart in Charticulator. However, are you still asking yourself; so what? What is the benefit of using Charticulator over using the default visuals installed with Power BI? After all, most of the charts we've created so far; column, bar and line charts… Read More

2D Region Plot Segments Part 1 - Sub-Layouts. In my last post I showed you how to create a line chart using a symbol as your glyph. You also learned something more important; that if you bind a numeric field to the Y-Axis you will create a "numeric" axis, a value axis in the true sense. Glyphs will then be plotted against this axis according to their value despite the shape of the glyph. However, you may be a little… Read More

Using Symbols & Y-Axis Weirdness. If you've been following along with my earlier posts on Charticulator, it may not have escaped your notice that I've always used either a Mark or a Line in the Glyph pane. Also, I've only ever created Column type charts in my examples. In this post, however, things are about to change because we're going to turn our attention to creating "Point" style charts, such as Line Charts and Scatter Plots, which use a Symbol… Read More