The Power of Themes in SpotOn Vantage vCharts
Posted by Chris Ovens on Tue, Apr 20, 2010
Hello all,
Chart Studio has a built in feature that can hopefully save you lot of time configuring charts. This very simple and very powerful feature is called a Theme.
A Theme in its simplest form allows you to save a snapshot of the properties in the format section you have defined for a chart. Then at a later time import the saved Theme to a new chart, saving you from having to manually specify those properties again. You can even import the saved Theme to a different type of chart and it will apply itself to all the properties that specific chart contains.
And now for the really powerful part. You can append Themes! How you ask? Here is an example to illustrate:
Lets say you have spent 30 mins getting a pie chart just right. You are so happy with your pie chart that you decide to save your configuration as a Theme named 'MyTheme', effectively preserving those settings for use later.
When you show your report to your boss he says "This looks great, but I think we should go with a column chart instead". Normally it would be a hassle to go through and set all the properties again, and get your chart to look just right. Luckily you saved a Theme, now all you need to do is apply the Theme 'MyTheme' to your new column chart. Now, you say "But when I applied my saved theme it didnt look perfect".
Unfortunately, pie and column charts have different properties so only the properties that column charts share with pie charts can be set for you. You spend 10 mins polishing the column chart so it looks fantastic. Here is when you can truly harness the 'Power of Themes' : you can append your theme to include the properties of the column chart to the saved Theme. If you save over 'MyTheme' it takes your column chart properties and adds them to your pie properties.
You can then repeat this for more charts, each time adding in properties specific to that chart. Thus, expanding the chart coverage of theme itself.
Hopefully this story sheds a little light onto how useful and time-saving themes can be.