In my previous article I gave an overview of the Microcharts plug-in for Xcelsius and a quick example of creating a Microcharts Datatable. In addition, I explained how to replicate the same example in Xcelsius using workarounds that would make development much more timely and harder to maintain.

In this article I would like to talk about some important features that Inovista Microcharts has that Xcelsius cannot reproduce. A very important table component that Xcelsius lacks is the ability to expand and contract your rows like a tree. Inovista has a component called a “Microchart Tree Grid” that allows a user to expand and contract rows so that users can group their rows accordingly. This is extremely important if we don’t want to clutter a table view with too many rows.

For those of you who have seen or used Bonavistas Microcharts on Excel http://www.bonavistasystems.com/. You’ll appreciate how you can show a huge amount of data on the screen without becoming too overwhelming to the end user. Using data tables with sparklines, bulletgraphs, etc puts data in a format where it is easy to read for the human eye.

Microcharts for Xcelsius provides us with the advanced table features that Xcelsius lacks. Well there are Xcelsius workarounds that can produce similar results but at the cost of performance, maintainance and formatting problems.