Are your labels crowded? Sometimes the reality is that you have more label than you have room for. Coming in DXperience 2011 volume 1 is a new way to deal with long axis and series labels. Currently if you have a long axis label you have a couple of options. Probably the easiest and most effective would be to change the data, just shorten the names. While this sounds good, in practice or in most business apps I’ve worked on changing the data is not an options. Also if you are tied to a Pivot Grid at may not be an option at all.
A second option would be to rotate the axis label so that width wouldn’t cause you overlap.
For a majority of scenarios this is an acceptable way to avoid overlapping labels. Depending on your layout this may not be a viable option.
Another option would be to stagger your axis labels.
This is another option that will work in a lot of scenarios but may not work on all of them.
Let’s look at our new options…
New Option
In DXperience 2011 volume 1 we are introducing two new properties on the Axis and Series Labels. The first property is MaxWidth which allows you to set the maximum label width (in pixels), the side effect of having a fixed width is that anything longer than the specified width is wrapped to a new line. The second property is MaxLineCount, which allows you to define the maximum number of lines to allow when wrapping text (0 being unlimited).
Lets look at how we can use these new properties. If we just adjust the MaxWidth and set it to 70.
Awesome, now we have a way to tame long labels without changing the orientation or staggering. As you can see this makes for a very readable set of axis labels.
Now let’s look at the second property MaxLineCount as I mentioned earlier this limits the number of lines we allow the label to wrap to. In the example below I’ve set the MaxLineCount to 1, meaning that we aren’t going to allow for any line wraps.
You’ll notice that the text that goes beyond the specified width is truncated and an ellipsis is added. These two options in addition to the already existing label options give you an immense amount of control over how you choose to display your labels.
We do sacrifice immediate readability in the truncated chart. A simple way to enhance readability without impacting the layout of the chart would be to use Hit Testing to show the full text when the mouse is hovered over an individual axis label.
While all of my above samples are using axis labels, these new properties are also give you the ability to have multi-line series labels as well.
Conclusion
As an added benefit these new properties also give you a way to dynamically handle the axis labels when resizing a chart, simply adjust the Max Width and Max Line Count parameters based on the width/height of the chart.
This and other exciting new features are found in DXperience 2011 volume 1 coming soon!
Tell me what you think of this feature in the comments below!