Prove Enterprise - Visualising data

While tables are useful for looking up information or finding specific numbers, it’s usually easier to see trends and make sense of data using charts.

To change how the answer to your question is displayed, click on the Visualisation button in the bottom-left of the screen to open the visualisation sidebar.

If a particular visualisation doesn’t really make sense for your answer, that option will appear in the “Other charts” section. You can still select one of these other charts, though you might need to fiddle with the chart options to make the chart work with your data.

Visualisation options

Each visualization type has its own advanced options.

To change the settings for a specific chart, for example a row chart, you could either:

• Click on the gear icon in the bottom left of the chart (next to the Visualisation button, or
• Click on Visualisation in the bottom left of the chart, then hover over the currently selected chart and click on the gear icon that pops up.

Visualisation types

Prove Enterprise comes with a bunch of different visualisation types:

Numbers

The Numbers option is for displaying a single number, nice and big.

Trends

The Trend visualisation is great for displaying how a single number has changed between two time periods.

Detail

The Detail visualisation shows a single result record (row) in an easy-to-read, two-column display.

Progress bars

Progress bars are for comparing a single number to a goal value that you set.

Gauges

Gauges allow you to show a single number in the context of a set of colored ranges that you can specify.

Tables

The Table option is good for looking at tabular data (duh), or for lists of things like users or orders.

Pivot tables

Pivot tables allow you swap rows and columns, group data, and include subtotals in your table. You can group one or more metrics by one or more dimensions.Line charts

Line charts are best for displaying the trend of a number over time, especially when you have lots of x-axis values. For more, check out our Guide to line charts and Time series analysis tutorials.

Bar charts

Bar charts are great for displaying a number grouped by a category (e.g., the number of users you have by country).

Area charts

Area charts are useful when comparing the proportions of two metrics over time. Both bar and area charts can be stacked.

Combo charts

Combo charts let you combine bars and lines (or areas) on the same chart.

Histograms

If you have a bar chart like Count of Users by Age, where the x-axis is a number, you’ll get a special kind of bar chart called a histogram where each bar represents a range of values (called a “bin”).

Row charts

Row charts are good for visualising data grouped by a column that has a lot of possible values, like a Vendor or Product Title field.

Waterfall charts

Waterfall charts are a kind of bar chart useful for visualising results that contain both positive and negative values.

Scatterplots and bubble charts

Scatterplots are useful for visualising the correlation between two variables, like comparing the age of your people using your app vs. how many dollars they’ve spent on your products.

Pie chart or donut charts

A pie chart or donut chart can be used when breaking out a metric by a single dimension, especially when the number of possible breakouts is small, like users by gender.

Funnel charts

Funnels are commonly used in e-commerce or sales to visualize how many customers are present within each step of a checkout flow or sales cycle. At their most general, funnels show you values broken out by steps, and the percent decrease between each successive step.

Maps

When you select the Map visualisation, Prove Enterprise will automatically try and pick the best kind of map to use based on the table or result set.

Formatting data in charts

While we’re talking about formatting, we thought you should also know that you can access formatting options for the columns used in a chart. Just open the visualisation settings and select the Data tab:

Then click on the gear icon next to the column that you want to format. Dates, numbers, and currencies tend to have the most useful formatting options.