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Charting is one of the one of most common requirements while working on SharePoint projects. SharePoint 2010 makes charting much more easy, with SharePoint 2010 Chart Web Part you can create charts with no coding at all. This brings huge power to end users as they can create pages that include rich content along with charts. Let’s take a look on how to use Chart Web Part and use a custom SharePoint list that contains your company employee’s salary records. You will use this list as a source for creating charts.
1. Create a new SharePoint Custom List with and name it “Salary”. Add three custom columns namely “Net”, “Gross” and “Bonus”, all three columns are of type “Single line of text”. Once done add couple of items to the list. Following figure shows how the list should look like after six items have been added. Off course you don’t need to use exactly same name and values.
2. Create a new SharePoint Page by clicking “Site Actions ‘ New Page” name the page “Salary Charts”. You should now have a new page.
3. Now click on the empty area located on the middle of the page and from the “Editing Tools” Group on the ribbon select “Web Part”. From the categories pane select “List and Libraries” and click on “Salary” List and finally click Add button. The following two screen shots show how the page looks before and after Salary List View web part is added to the page.
4.
5. Repeat Step 4 but select “Chart Web Part” under “Business Data” Categories. Finally click “Save & Close” to save this configuration for the page.
6. You should now have a “Chart Web Part” just under “Salary List View Web Part”.
7. Now you need to bind the Chart Web Part to the input source which in this case a “Salary” list. Click on “Data & Appearance” from the “Chart Web Part”. From the first page of the wizard select “Connect Chart To Data”, as show in figure below.
8. Select “Connect to a List” and click “Next”, as show in figure below.
9. Select “Salary” list from the List drop down, and click “Next”, see the figure below.
10. Click “Next”.
11. From “Y Field” drop down select “Gross”, this is the column from the Salary list. Click “Finish”, as show in figure below
12. The Chart will now display the gross salaries on the Y Axis and name of employees on the X Axis.
13. Let’s add some quick formatting to make the Chart more visually appealing. Click on “Data & Appearance” and click “Customize Your Chart”.
14. On the “Select Chart Type” step, select the “3D Chart Types” from the “Chart Templates” and select “Cylinder”. Click “Finish”
15. You will now have 3D cylinder chart.
As you see, adding and working with charts in SharePoint 2010 is extremely easy. Because of no code approach, well trained users can add and remove charts as required, this also positively impact the productivity.
