Create reports with charts

Transcript

When you’re trying to get a sense of the information contained in a large amount of data, charts can be very helpful. For instance, if your boss wants to see how work is progressing, a long list of tasks might not convey the information as clearly as a pie chart showing tasks grouped by progress status. How helpful a chart can be depends a lot on the data you’re showing and the kind of chart that you’re using. Workfront recommends you try different kinds of charts and see which one works best for the information you want to display. You want to get a sense of how many late tasks are in your projects. Start by creating a report showing late tasks grouped by project. Call it Late Tasks by Project. Like all Workfront reports, this will start out as a list report. Then you’ll add the chart. In the Filters tab, you want to see only incomplete late tasks on current projects. So add these three filter rules. Task, Progress Status, Equal, Late, Task, Is Complete, Equal, False, Project, Status Equates With, Current. You can leave the Columns View tab alone at this time. The defaults are fine. In the Groupings tab, group by project name. You can save and close the report at this point if you want to make sure the results are what you want so far. To continue editing the report, choose Edit from the Report Actions drop-down menu. Now click the Chart tab. For this report, you’re going to create a pie chart. This is a common way to show the relative number of items that different categories contribute to an overall total. We want to get a visual idea of how the late tasks are distributed across different projects. When you click the pie option, you see the pie wedges will be the projects. That’s because we grouped the tasks by the project they’re grouped in. Groupings are required for every chart type except gauge. The value area lets you choose from several options. These normally come from the columns in the view. Record count is what you want because that shows how many late tasks there are in each project wedge. Before you close, let’s go into Report Settings and make sure Chart is selected as the default tab. This will make it so the chart version of the report comes up by default rather than the list view. Click Save and Close and take a look at the report. As you can see, the report has three tabs, Chart, Summary, and Details. The Details tab is the list report. The Summary tab provides a summary of what we’re grouping on. This is the same information as in the chart just without the chart. Notice how the chart helps us compare projects based on the number of late tasks they have. One thing this chart doesn’t tell you is anything about the size of each project. How many tasks are there besides those that are late? Let’s create another chart with all the tasks, an additional grouping, and a different chart type and see if we like that better. The new report will be very similar to the one you just created. The easiest way to create the new report is to copy the first one and then make changes. Copy this report from the Report Actions menu and name it Tasks by Project and Progress Status. Edit the new report to add another grouping. Task Progress Status So the report will group first by project name and then by task progress status. This way, you’ll see the total number of tasks in each project and how many are in each progress status. Next, go to the Filters tab and remove the filter rules for progress statuses and completeness. Because completed tasks retain the progress status they had when they were marked complete, this is a good way to see how all the tasks performed during project execution. Now go to the Chart tab. This time, choose a column chart. Both a column chart and a bar chart allow additional grouping options, which are available when there are two or more groupings in the Groupings tab. Choose the Stacked option under the Group Columns and Group by Progress Status. This will show each project as a single column with the height of the column based on the number of tasks in the project. Each stack in the column will represent a different progress status with the size of the stack based on the number of tasks with that progress status. If you want to use specific colors in the chart, such as your company’s official colors, you can use the Custom Colors option to select what you want. Save and close. As you can see, you’re getting a lot more information in this chart. Because the data is stacked by record count, projects with more tasks have a taller column and it’s easy to tell which projects have the most late tasks. Click on any stack to see the tasks in that stack.