Working with Chart web part in SharePoint 2010

One of the lacking feature in MOSS 2007 was not having functionality to draw chart based on various sources even not with list.

Now with SharePoint 2010, we can draw chart not only from lists but also from various sources like SQL server or excel for example.

In this post, I am going to demonstrate you a way to draw chart using list by using SharePoint Chart web part.

I have a list in my site with following data. Data is only shown for an example. Real scenario can be different based on business need.

Find and add chart web part to a page.

The moment you add chart web part, you get something like this

Click on data and appearances. It gives you two options, connect with the data and customize your chart.

Click on connect chart to data. You get an option to get the data from list, BDC, excel or another web part. Select list.

Advantage is you not only can select list from the same site but from the entire site collection.

You get a screen showing data from the list. You can also set the filter option as mentioned in a screen shot. It allows you to return only limited number of data from the list if you wish to. You can also preview it. I am leaving it empty.

Now you are on a screen where you can actually bind the data with the chart web part. Here we can select type of chart, columns for x and y axes, labels for the chart, Grouping option etc.

Click on finish. Bingo!! We now have a chart on our page.

But still it does not give proper picture. So let us go ahead and now click on advanced properties.

You can set various properties here. You can change back ground color, gradient style, hatch style, skin style, change the palette.

You can check out different options from left hand side which also allows you to show legends, 2D or 3D chart.

You can also show labels of data.

If you would like to have connection for the chart web part, you can also use content menu and then configuring data section.

Now if you go back to data and appearances and click on customize the chart, you get an option to select a chart type from range of different chart types.

And then you can follow the same procedure to configure the chart the way you want.

The best part is the chart web part is dynamic, means any changes to the data or any addition to the data gets reflected automatically

Let’s change our existing list data and add one more list item.

I changed February data from 1670 to 2500 and added one more list item for September month.

I hope you like this post. Keep exploring chart web part which is definitely a welcome addition to SharePoint 2010.