Easy graphs in a View
Posted by Theo Heselmans on July 10th, 2007
In his recent blog entry at Interface Matters, Chris Blatnick talked about a way of creating Graphs in a view using colored columns. It's a nice idea, but a bit cumbersome to develop.
It reminded me of a 'hack' I found way back. You can use icons in a view column ever since version 3, but as of version 5, I discovered that you could use shared images too. Instead of using the number in a 'Show as Icon' column, you could enter the name of the image as a string, and it would show it ! As of version 6 it's documented.
Here's what you have to do: Create bars of different length in your favorite drawing application. You'll find my bar-set attached (Bar0.gif...Bar10.gif). Add them to your shared images.
Use or create a view with a icon column. Here's my example:
Just easy to do, nice bars, and background colors, even for alternate rows show through.
[Updated] I woke up this morning thinking there's a lot more you can do, by being a little bit more creative:
The 3 extra bar-sets are included in the attachment too.
Attachments: Theo_Bars.zip
Category: Domino/Notes | 
Technorati: Show-n-Tell Thursday, SnTT
Comments (10)
I too got inspired by Chris and you. My solution is very similar to yours but instead of creating several graphics I only have one and repeat as needed.
I also blog about it: {Link}
Very cool, and giving the image resources human-friendly names like "70-80%" will make the mouseover of the graphic cleaner. My complete thoughts are here { Link }
@Vitor: Very cool, I did not know you could put in more than 1 image in the same column !
Nice!
Very nice indeed. Using your approach you can use different colors depending on the bar length (e.g. red 0-30, yellow 31-70, green 71-100).
:-) stw
Indeed, nice job!
Very nice ideas from all involved. 3 or 4 heads are better than one.
Chris
Great stuff guys - this is inspiring me to get creative!
I love it when the Notes community comes together!
Hey there Theo.
Kudos on a very good, clean, and simple SNTT tip.
BTW - I really dig the tractor/trailer icon set you did -very cool and clean.
Good job!
-Devin.
can this be done for column totals rather than single fields?
@Paul,
sorry Paul, totals is a value being calculated by Notes, based on number. You can't compute an image here.
The only thing you could do, is create and maintain special 'total' documents yourself, and use those in a 'graphical' view. Hierarchical drill-down is not possible then, but you could use an embedded view, to show the 'details' (even in a preview).