Another punch in the face to the anti-pie-chart comunity

IBM had published a video tutorial on... Dynamically exploding pie charts... "WTF?" is the only thing I could come up with...


Seems that they have not bothered fixing anything that would be useful for C 10.1 and instead wasted their time on worthless clicking on pie charts...


What about putting some effort to the prompts? Hello! They are ugly! And you can't do anything about that unless you hack around the CSS. Now, how many people are willing to go through all the trouble? Seriously, IBM, the basic need to have search and select prompt resized and defaulting to 'Contains any of these keywords' is like breathing and eating.

And by the way- things in charts (bars, dots etc) end up with black borders around them by default in Cognos 10. So not only you will have to endlessly click to remove gridlines with alternating backgrounds, but also remove the borders around bars and dots. While I am spilling the beans here already, there is no consistency as to where this "border of chart item" property is set. In scatter charts once you go to edit the Palette properties, you will find a new tab in the window, intuitively called 'Properties'. And amongst all the many (one) properties available there you will find Marker borders...

If you try and remove borders around bars in a bar chart this way you will be surprised. There is no 'Properties' tab within the Palette window of a bar chart! Instead, you have to select the series you are modifying and in the properties window hide the border:

Lets just not mind the fact, that description of this item suggests a border around the whole chart body shall be hidden.

Will have to work out a setup of default chart look. Otherwise this will be way too much work.

To finish off- a quote from one customer regarding use of pie charts:
"We don't want them to analyze the data too much."

Jep, sums it all up. Maybe dynamically exploding ones will make management drift off even further to the cartoon fairy tale land.
M.

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