I have set up a Bar chart visual, in which I have three categories of values the Bars are supposed to chart across periods (year halves). After I setup the visual, I see three things which are not consistent. (Note: I have small multiples applied too. but even without, I have the below issues)
Issue1: if 1 of 3 categories is not present for the period, the other two are not self-adjusting and placed at the center. It looks as if the there is an invisible bar there. I have highlighted this issue in the screenshot with ‘Yellow’ marker.
Issue2: The label colors are not consistent. The label colors are not consistent across the bars. for bars which have low count, the labels are either black or the same color as the bar with white interior and the bar color outline. I have highlighted this issue in the screenshot with ‘Blue’ marker.
Issue3: If none of the categories are available for the period, it’s just empty, taking up space. I agree that this might be a use case to show that way to certain reports, but would be nice to turn that behavior On/Off. I have highlighted this issue in the screenshot with ‘Orange’ marker.
Please let me know if there is a way to fix these or any workarounds.
Hi @sandeep.k and welcome back to the Quick Community!
Right off the bat as I was reading, I thought your issues could be pertaining to the use of small multiples. A bit ago other Quick Sight users had made a few posts about some problems when trying to apply small multiples to their visuals, but as you stated you are still experiencing the issues when small multiples are not used.
First, thank you for outlining your issues very thoroughly. I would like to ask for more details in terms of how your visual is set up (fields used, calculated field formulas, etc.). For instance, if you are using a calculated field, how your formula is set up could determine why issues 1 and 3 are happening.
Now for issue 2, there is unfortunately not much we can do in terms of customization for data labels. My recommendation for that is to not have the data label font colors be set to default and manually assign a color to it. That way the color will be the same for all bars.
As per my understanding, there seems to be no solution to Issue 2? then can we flag this as a feature request? coz from what I see, when a label is displayed outside the bar, why should there be two color themes applied? that is just confusing.
As for Issues 1 & 3: Below are fileds used,
x-axis: Period
value: events (aggregated to count Distinct)
group/color: carrier
small multiples: event type
No calculated columns are applied to the fields. all are cols from Datasets
One more issue I faced today is sometimes, the bar sizes don’t match. In the below scenario, the bar size are not consistent and the lone bar in the second multiple (1) if it increases in size if no adjacent bars are there, then, is not filling up the space. looks like its standing next to an invisible bar. (2) if its not supposed to increase in size, then how is it doing it below?
Looking into this further, I think the issues that you are experiencing are stuff that the bar charts in quick sight natively do. As you can see in my screenshot below, I experienced the same outcomes, at least for issues 1,3, and 4.
I am unsure why the bar charts are behaving like this in terms of why some bars adjust to values that are not there and some bars leave room for a bar that could have been there. My guess is it has to be with how Quick Sight is interpreting the data and while the data isn’t there, I guess it still leaves a placeholder in some instances. I tried to mess around a little with creating a few calculated fields and utilizing filters to mess with the behavior but found no luck in that. One thing you could do is potentially look at HighCharts and that could give you further control on the bar chart behavior. However, HighCharts can sometimes make visuals more complicated than they have to be, so I do want to make note of that.
Nevertheless, everything you have stated here is very important to make note of and a feature request should be made of this. I will attach the ‘feature-request’ tag to this post and that will help increase visibility to the Quick Team.
