BigPicture Custom Charts

Overview

Teams manage a myriad of key insights and projects, each requiring specific attention and answers. To streamline the process of accessing and visualizing crucial information, BigPicture introduces the innovative Custom Charts gadget, which creates charts from BigPicture boxes.

BigPicture Boxes serve as comprehensive groupings for your projects, products, teams, or portfolios, providing a structured overview of your organizational landscape.

When viewing results, the first step is to choose the content you wish to display, facilitated by the intuitive BigPicture search panel. This panel empowers you to select the data you need precisely. Once your data is curated, the BigPicture Custom Charts gadget takes center stage, presenting the results of your search and offering flexible options for visualizing your data effectively.

The BigPicture Search Panel

Select and filter your boxes

The BigPicture search allows you to filter out unwanted boxes by searching through your boxes and selecting the elements you want to display in your BigPicture Custom Chart gadget.

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You can refine your search through the selected boxes by ID, Status, Box type, Start/end date range, or text (search mode filters information based on the BigPicture summary fields).

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The section “Configure filters to refine your search” helps you reduce the scope of your report

Select the type of data

After selecting the boxes to set the scope of your custom charts, you have to indicate whether you want to create the charts based on fields from boxes or fields from tasks. If you select tasks, you’ll be able to filter the scope even more.

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Boxes: Available type of fields

BigPicture fields: These fields can be configurable (e.g., End Date), non-configurable (e.g., summary), or native App fields (don’t correspond to any external tool). You can read more in.

Available fields: ID, Type, Name, Status, Leader, Created Date, Start Date, End Date, Actual Cost, Archived, Budget, Description, Closed Date, Icon, Inactive For, Period Mode, Estimated Cost, Sequentiality…

Tasks: Available types of fields

BigPicture Built-in fields: All existing attributes of Basic Tasks can be displayed using built-in fields. You can see a matrix with the different fields here: Concept of a field | Built in fields matrix.

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BigPicture to Jira fields mapping (App configuration > general > fields)

Available fields: Icon, Key, Summary, Status, Assignee, Scheduling Mode, Start Date, End Date, Actual Cost, Baseline End Date, Baseline End Date Discrepancy, Baseline Start Date Discrepancy, Baseline Start Date, Catalog, Color, Duration Calendar Days, Duration Working Days, Estimated Cost, Milestone, Modification Time, Original Estimate, Outline level, Overdue (End Date), Overdue (Start Date), Remaining Estimate, Progress, Risk Probability, Risk Consequence, Skills, Status Category, Sub-box, Story Points, Team, Task ID, Time Spent, Workload contouring mode, Time Tracking

Filter your tasks: Use filters (free text, assignee, status, dates) to narrow down specific tasks to ensure precision in your search.

Configure how to view your data

View type: Table

You can view the results of your BigPicture search as a table, where you can select the columns that are displayed. Using the table view, you can display results as:

• Group of results

• Aggregation of results

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Group results

Group results by selected columns

If you are familiar with the GROUP BY statement in SQL, you can choose how to group the results of your BigPicture search.
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When you select to group the results from the previously selected columns, the result rows are split into groups based on their values. This means that only one row is displayed for each group.

Pay attention to selecting the columns based on the results that you want to display for each group

EXAMPLE

If we filter the previous list of issues by the column Status, the results show only two rows, one for the status To Do and the other for the status Done.

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Selecting the columns Status, Name, and ID, the resulting list displays three rows.

The grouping of columns is typically combined with aggregations.

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Aggregations

Aggregations are also common in the SQL domain. These functions get the values of grouped rows as the input of that function to return a calculated value.

This gadget supports five functions:

• Count. It returns the number of rows in that group.

• Sum. It returns the addition of the sequence of the numbers of the group.

• Min. It returns the smallest value of the range of values of the group.

• Max. It returns the largest value of the range of values of the group.

• Mean. The arithmetic mean sums the values of the grouped rows and divides the result by how many rows are being averaged.

For example, if we want to view the number of Boxes with status, leader, and description:

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View type: Line chart

A line chart represents the results of your BigPicture search as a series of data points connected by a straight line. It’s used to visualize trends over periods or dates in the x-axis.

In the example, the line chart plots the issues created and closed date for a given date range.

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View type: Multi-line chart

The multiline chart is useful when we need to compare data in a time series or trends.

The example chart shows the issues with an end date and a description grouped weekly for a given data range.

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View type: Tile chart

This visual representation presents the information in a set of tiles. You can display the result of your BigPicture search and apply aggregations.

For example, you might want to find out the status of your team activities, view the progress, and count the number of boxes.

After you apply the filters to your query, the results are displayed in tiles showing both the number and the percentage, in the example, for the items In Progress, Not Started, and Closed.

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View type: Bar chart

A bar chart represents the results of your BigPicture search as a series of rectangular bars, the height of which is proportional to the represented values. It’s useful for comparing results of different types or categories.

For example, the example Bar Chart shows the created and closed issues displayed for the selected date range on a quarterly basis.

Note that you can select the bars to be horizontal or vertical, as in the example.

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View type: Grouped bar chart

We can perform more complex comparisons of the information returned by our query grouping by specific fields.

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View type: Stacked bar chart

The grouped bar chart is similar to the bar chart with the combined results of the groups on top of each other. Thus, the height is the combined result, making it not appropriate for cases with negative values.

In the illustrative example, the chart displays all the tasks organized by their respective Created Date and with a description. The output showcases all the Created Dates distributed throughout each week in a month for a selected date range, as per the user's specified date range.

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View type: Pie chart

A pie chart is a visualization of your data in a circular graph, where each slice indicates the quantity of the result of your BigPicture search. When a pie chart has several sections or slices, it’s difficult to compare one with another. To overcome this inconvenience, the pie chart comes with a table indicating the values of each slice and the % it represents.

When the field selected in “Chart by” has a date format e.g., Created, a new selector appears to allow grouping by day, week, month, quarter, or year, making the results easier to understand and communicate.

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View type: Area chart

The area chart represents the results of your BigPicture search as a series of data points connected by a straight line and filled with a colored area. The colored area can help emphasize the magnitude of the values presented. An area chart is often used to show trends over time or categories and to compare multiple series of data.

In the example, the chart plots the issues based on their Created Date and Closed Date, organizing the Created Dates into monthly groupings for enhanced clarity and insight.

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View type: Stacked area chart

A stacked area chart is a variation of the area chart in which the areas are stacked on top of each other instead of being overlaid. Each stack represents a category or a group, and the height of the stack represents the total value of the group. It's useful for showing the relative contribution of each group to the total and tracking changes in the total over time. However, stacked area charts may not be suitable for displaying negative values, as they can become difficult to read.

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Switch Between Chart and Table View

A switch in the gadget header lets users choose to display the chart or a table with the underlying data.

This option is available in the gadget’s main view when the dashboard is not in edit mode.

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Custom colors

Colors have the power to communicate meaning, provoke emotions, and highlight information. Within our organizations and teams, it’s common to associate concepts with specific colors, making the communication of ideas and information easier and quicker.

Whenever you select a chart, you’ll be able to select the color of each specific segment or value of it:

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The color picker allows you to select a color either by hexadecimal code, RGB, or our pre-defined 24-color palette (selected based on the right contrasts and tones).

Hide segments

When communicating information in a chart, not all the results are needed, sometimes because one of those values or segments distorts the results or deviates the attention.

Clicking on the eye icon, the corresponding segment is hidden (or shown) in the chart:

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Reorder segments

In the same line of hiding segments or customizing the colors of our charts, rearranging the position of the existing segments or values reinforces the way we transmit the information with our charts.

Just drag and drop any segment or value from the six dots on the left side of the segments and move it upwards or downwards to the correct place, and the chart will be updated accordingly.

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Limit the Number of Segments on the X-Axis

You can limit the number of segments displayed on the X-axis in charts.

• Set a maximum number of segments in the input field.

• The chart displays only the highest-value segments in the dataset.

• Any remaining segments are grouped into a synthetic segment labeled Others.

This helps simplify visualizations by focusing on the most relevant data.

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Configuration

Give your gadget a meaningful name so it is clear what it does and how to use it. Fill out the remaining of the fields as applicable:

• The data source, where the source BigPicture instance is installed.

• Select multiple boxes, and use the Tree locator to select the data that you want to investigate.

• The Configure filters to refine your search allow you to insert additional criteria. Choose from Text, ID, Status, Type, and Dates.

• The View Type Here, you choose the visual representation of your BigPicture search. Results can be displayed in a Table or a chart format.

• Columns (just for the table view) allow you to choose the columns that you want to display.

• Group results by selected columns. Group your search results by the previously selected Columns.

Dashboards

This gadget is not included in any pre-defined dashboard. Check other orphan gadgets:

See also