The Chart tile

The Chart tile is the one you’ll reach for most, and it does considerably more than “bar, line, pie”. This page is its reference: the chart types, then the Chart options editor where most of the power lives.

Tip

Before reaching for the ECharts option tile to get a shape you think is missing — check this page first. Radar, scatter, treemap, sunburst and waterfall are all built in, and the built-in versions inherit the App theme, support conditional formatting, and stay editable by whoever inherits your App.

Chart types

Pick the type in the tile’s ⚙ editor. The menu groups them:

Group	Types
Bars	Bar, Stacked bar, Waterfall
Lines	Line, Stacked line, Area, Stacked area
Proportional	Pie, Donut, Treemap, Sunburst
Matrix	Heatmap, Radar
Points	Scatter, Bubble
Geo	Map (choropleth — by country)

A few worth calling out:

• Waterfall — running contributions, for a bridge from one total to another.
• Treemap / Sunburst — proportion with far more categories than a pie can carry; sunburst adds the hierarchy’s depth.
• Heatmap — two categorical axes with the measure as colour. Rows on one axis, columns on the other.
• Scatter / Bubble — see Scatter plots two measures.
• Map (choropleth) — see Maps are by country.

Scatter plots two measures

Give a scatter two measures and it plots them against each other — the first on x, the second on y, one point per row member. That’s the volume-vs-value read that finds a high-volume/low-value segment.

Bubble takes a third measure for the radius.

With a single measure there’s no pair to plot, so the chart falls back to plotting that measure across the row categories.

Points are labelled with their member name while the labels still fit. Two limits apply, and the second is the one that usually bites: at most 25 points, and at most 220 characters of label text in total.

The character budget exists because a point count alone doesn’t predict overlap — labels are drawn to the right of each point, so what actually collides is their combined width. Thirteen warehouses called Quality Warehousing and Trucking overprint each other long before twenty-five stores called Store 6 do.

So a scatter of eighteen job titles like Store Assistant Manager draws no labels at all — eighteen is under the point cap, but the titles run well past 220 characters. That isn’t a bug; it’s the tile deciding the tooltip will read better. Shorten the member captions if you want labels back.

Maps are by country

The choropleth resolves each row’s caption against a world countries basemap. Common aliases (USA, UK) are matched automatically.

Sub-national names — US states, counties, postcodes — will not place, because there’s no basemap for them. If some rows don’t match, the tile says so above the chart:

1 of 16 categories matched the country map (no match: Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, +12 more). This map plots countries — sub-national names won’t place.

Caution

Watch for a name that matches the wrong shape. A cube with a US state called Georgia will paint Georgia the country. The coverage notice is the signal to check: if the ratio looks wrong, the map is the wrong tile for that level.

Under Chart options a map gets a colour ramp (Blues, Greens, Reds, Viridis, Diverging) and a missing data choice — leave a country blank, or treat its missing measure as zero.

Chart options

The ⚙ editor’s Chart options button (“Title, axes, legend, dual-axis & trend…”) opens the chart editor. Everything here is per-tile and persists with the App.

Titles, axes and legend

Chart title, x-axis label, y-axis label, whether the legend shows and where it sits (top / bottom / left / right).

Colours

A named palette — Theme default, Vibrant, Cool, Warm, Earth — plus per-series colour overrides keyed by series name. Leave a series untouched to let the palette drive it.

Note

Colour-blind-safe mode, when a viewer has it on, overrides both for accessibility. That’s deliberate: an accessibility preference outranks an author’s palette.

Y axes — the dual-axis fix

Two measures of very different magnitude on one axis makes the smaller one invisible: script counts in the thousands against revenue in the tens of millions flatlines the counts against the zero line.

• Auto dual axis splits them when one series’s maximum is an order of magnitude or more below the dominant one.
• Per series overrides that decision — force any measure to the left or right axis.

This is the single most useful control in the editor, and the one authors most often miss.

Series type (combo charts)

Give a series its own chart type — revenue as bars with a growth-rate line over it — from Bar / Line / Area / Scatter. Cartesian types only; mixing a pie into a bar chart isn’t meaningful.

Trend line

Linear regression, moving average, or weighted moving average, with a configurable period. Trend lines render on line / stacked-line / area charts, using the first measure column.

Sort and Top N

Sort categories by the first measure (ascending / descending, or keep the query’s order) and trim to the top 5 / 10 / 20 / 50. Both are client-side — no re-query — and they persist with the tile, so the tidied-up view is what your audience sees.

Number format

Applies to value text — axis labels, tooltip values, data labels — not to the category axis:

Field	Effect
Prefix / Suffix	Prepended / appended verbatim (£, %, ms)
Decimals	Fixed decimal places; blank = natural precision
Thousands separator	Locale grouping
Abbreviate large numbers	Collapses to k / M / B / T

Leave it all blank for raw values.

Reference lines and bands

Draw threshold / target lines across bar, line, area and scatter charts — a Y line is horizontal at a value, an X line vertical at a category index — and shade a target range with a band.

Conditional formatting

Threshold-driven colours per measure, so bars past a target take a different colour without touching the query.

Anomaly detection

Turn on Detect anomalies and the tile marks outlying points on the series. Useful on a long trend where the eye slides over a single bad week.

Forecast

Turn on Show forecast and the tile appends a projected horizon — a dashed continuation with a confidence band — beyond the last actual point.

Note

Both of these are per-tile toggles in the ⚙ editor, alongside the query. They describe what the tile draws, so they travel with the App.

Cross-filter on brush

Tick Emit cross-filter on brush and dragging a range on this chart filters the other tiles on the page to those members. The source tile keeps its full context so you can see where the selection sits; Esc clears it.

This is the fastest way to make a page feel like an application rather than a report: a trend chart at the top, brush a fortnight, and the rest of the page follows.

Auto-refresh

Every query-bound tile — not just charts — can re-run itself on an interval: 1, 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes. Active filters are honoured on each run, and the timer pauses while the browser tab is hidden, so a wall display doesn’t hammer the server in the background.

Related

• Building pages & tiles — the tile types and how binding works.
• Custom tiles — the declarative renderers for shapes these sixteen don’t cover.
• Design & theming — charts paint from the App’s tokens.