Types of flashboards

Line charts are most often used to display trends. Line charts display values along a common baseline, which allows quick and accurate comparisons.

You can also use line charts to display grouped data represented by different symbols and colors for each component.

Bar charts are most often used for direct comparison of magnitude between categories. Bar charts can also be used to show time-dependent data when the time interval is small. For example, a bar chart might be useful to compare the number of tickets assigned to various employees in one month. 

When the bars in a bar chart are of equal width, the length of each bar is proportional to its value, allowing you to compare the differences between bars more easily. 

Vertical bar charts are most often used to portray time series, such as the number of high tickets during the course of a month. Horizontal bar charts are most often used to compare data directly, such as the number of tickets assigned to several employees. 

If your bar labels contain a lot of text, consider using horizontal bars that allow you to have more room on the vertical axis. 

Stacked bar charts consist of segmented bars. Each segment represents a share of the total value in the bar. Stacked bar charts are suitable for presenting discrete data. 

Warning: Stacked bar charts are not recommended for:

• Subtle comparisons, as comparisons are difficult among the second, third, or subsequent segments in a stacked bar because there is no common baseline.
• Components that exhibit irregular or sharp changes in represented values.

Area charts are used to display a limited number of related, continuous variables. 

Stacked area charts consist of irregular segments, each of which represents a share of the total value in the graph. Stacked area charts are suitable for displaying the trend of values over categories or time.

Stacked area charts are not recommended for subtle comparisons, as comparisons are difficult among the second, third, or subsequent segments because there is no common baseline. 

Pie charts are most often used to display a few components that are easily distinguishable. Typically, each slice of a pie chart displays statistics from one variable.

For example, a pie chart can display one employee's High, Medium, and Low tickets. When you display a pie chart flashboard, the individual percentages of each slice are displayed.

You can display both percentages and actual values of each slice by setting the showvalues parameter to 1.

Meter charts measure the most recent variable value from the variable associated with that meter. Meters can be configured to show increasing levels of severity.

For example, you can create a meter that measures the total number of unassigned High priority tickets. You can configure the meter to display the total number of tickets in colored zones (up to 20 ticket counts in the green zone, between 20 and 40 tickets in the yellow zone or Warning Threshold, and 40 to 50 tickets in the red zone or Alert Threshold). 

You can also set up a Flashboards Alarm to send a warning to a specified recipient when the needle enters the Alert Threshold.

Text charts display one value and its associated text. For example, you might use a text chart to display the average number of daily unassigned tickets at the end of one week. 

Capacity charts display the value in the percentage form. Capacity chart can be a single bar with two or more sections or multiple bars that are of equal size stacked one above the other. 

Some features of the capacity flashboards are:

• embedded, stacked bar with horizontal layout
• Y axis line and labels are invisible
• X axis line is invisible but labels are visible on the top of the bars

Each colored bar or section represents a task or an entity. The length of the bar represents 100% of the task or the entity. The tooltip on the flashboard displays the percentage of task progress or entity group.