Waterfall Charts in SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise 4.2
I've just taken a look at the new Waterfall Chart feature in CR4E 4.2 SP2. I thought the idea of tracking weight loss over a period of time would be a good visual representation of the data. My data is very simple, consisting of a weekly period starting on the first Sunday of the week from the beginning of 2016 until the current week. I have stored the weight in kilograms and then a variance from comparing the weight loss (or gain!!!) between weeks.
The Waterfall chart requires one dimension object and a single measure. From the image below, we can conclude that the overall weight loss was 15.1 kilograms.
It would be great if the Chart Highlighting Expert could be used here. As you can see from the image it is unavailable. This way, I could conditionally shade each element of the chart to be coloured red for a weight gain and green for a weight loss.
Also, there is no conditional formatting option for colour when editing the chart series.
There are some conditional formatting options for the chart itself. A compromise would perhaps be to change the fill colour using a conditional formula, but this could only look at data for a single week of weight loss and then change the fill colour based on whether there was a weight loss or gain, or if the weight remained the same as the previous week.
I can calculate the week number by using a formula called @Week No with the syntax
The chart background will appear green for a weight loss, red for a weight gain and yellow if there is no change.
Conclusion.
There is clearly room for enhancements to this new feature. Conditional formattng on individual elements of the chart would be a great start.