Tutorial Part II: Your First Chart

So you've mastered Chartio dashboards? Now it's time to create your first chart. This tutorial provides a brief walkthrough of the essentials of visualizing your business data.

First Steps

Since this is your first chart, you have two options. Since Chartio created a starter dashboard for you automatically, you can always edit one of those chart directly. In this tutorial, however, we'll start from scratch. The first thing you'll want to do is click on the "Add Chart" button in the upper right hand corner.

This will take you to the heart of Chartio--the chart creation page, which looks like this.

Chart Creation Basics

We cover the Chart Creation basics here. For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll note that the left hand dropdown menu represents your datasource, its tables and columns, as pictured below.

Your First Chart

Creating a chart is as easy as dragging the columns in your datasource to the dataset window to the right, which looks like this.

The dataset window lets you define what column you'd like to be on your X axis and Y Axis. Generally speaking, the x axis is reserved for categorical data, such as: Time, Department, Region and so on. Alternatively, the Y axis should be used for quantitative data, such as: number of sales, total compensation, unique users and so on. We also provide a deeper discussion of these differences.

For our first chart, we'll create a time series chart showing the number of daily posts on Stackoverflow.com, a demo dataset. We'll start by dragging the time column (or dimension) into the X axis.

Once the drag and drop action completed, Chart.io locked the column in place. Since we wanted to see posts on a daily basis, we'll click on the drop down menu on the column itself, like so:

Here, we'll select "Day" as our timeframe. While we're at it, let's drag the column called "# of posts" to serve as our Y axis.

Now that we've filled out the dataset, we're ready to actually create our first chart! Simply click "Chart it" and we'll see our result.

Voila! You can always rename any chart you create by simply clicking on the title area. Now that this chart has been created, it's automatically saved. So if you return to your dashboard, it will be waiting for you.