Charts and Dashboards Part 1

Introduction – 00:00

Hello friends, welcome to part 1 of our look at Charts and Dashboards in the Freezerworks Web Client. Would you like to aggregate and visualize important, big-picture data about your lab, clinic, or study in colorful, easy-to-read charts every time you and others log into the Web Client? This is the purpose of the new Dashboard page. But before we get there, we need charts to build dashboards with.

Configure Charts Menu – 00:42

To get started, go to the Home page, hover over Dashboards, and select Configure Charts. This will take you to a list of available charts. If there are already charts in your list, go ahead and look through them to see if what you need already exists. Information about who created the chart and what Dashboard it is on will be located beneath every chart. Now, to create your own chart, click Create New Chart.

Creating a New Chart – 01:10

Start by naming your chart. Then select what type of data you want displayed in it. If you want a chart of patient's data, select Patients, for sample’s data, select Samples, and so on. For our example, I'm going to select Aliquots. You'll then want to determine what type of chart you want to create. In Freezerworks, you currently have three options. You can create a column chart, a line chart, or a pie chart. Since pie charts are less complicated by nature, there are fewer fields to work with. So, let's do a column, that way I can show you all the possible fields. Now, we need to imagine the chart we want to create, what data we want to see and where. The X Axis dropdown dictates what field will display horizontally on the chart. This drop down will contain all non-unique fields in your database, as long as they are valid according to the Data to Display. An aliquot chart cannot display Transaction, Test, or Test Results fields, for example. The Y Axis drop-down dictates what field will display vertically on the chart. For this dropdown, we limit your selections to either a count of the data type or sums of any available numeric fields. For instance, if I wanted my chart to display the number of aliquots per Aliquot Type, I'd select Aliquot Type for my X Axis and Count of Aliquots for my Y Axis. Maybe I want to know what's exactly left of each Aliquot Type instead of Count of Aliquots, I'd select Sum of Current Amount or another numeric field that calculates this. With column and line charts you can also select a Group By field to aggregate the results of the chart, and display those aggregates on the X and Y Axis. So let's say I wanted my aliquots to be grouped according to their statuses, and then I could see how much I have for the types of each status. To do that, I'd simply select Aliquot Status for my Group By field. This dropdown will contain the same fields available in the X Axis dropdown.

These next three checkboxes are purely optional. If you'd like the chart to automatically refresh daily, check on Enable Daily Refresh. You can always refresh charts manually, but checking this on allows you to determine a low-traffic time to run the query and still give you up-to-date results. Next, you can decide whether you want to include nulls and zero values in your chart. Zeros are actual entered zeros in the database, and nulls are fields where there is nothing entered.

Search Filter – 03:55

Finally, the last piece of every chart is a Search Filter. This determines what records will be displayed on the chart, and it works just like creating a Search in the Web Client, or Advanced Search on the Desktop. Speaking of, if you already have created a search you'd like to display as a chart, click Use Saved Search and select the desired search. Once you do, you can always modify the chart’s version of it, if necessary. Of course, you can always build your own search from scratch. For instance, let's say I just want to see all the aliquots in my database. I'd select a Unique Aliquot ID and then non-empty field, but what if I wanted to only see the aliquots from the last year? I could select Aliquots Creation Date, then “within the last” for the comparator, then 365 for the days. I'll do 500 to make sure we get good data.

Changing Chart Type – 05:00

So, save the chart and voila, a column chart displaying a snapshot of my aliquot inventory according to Status and Aliquot Type. Now, if I wanted, at any time I could change the chart to a different type, say a pie chart. This automatically removes my X and Y Axis fields, as are not applicable to a pie chart. Click Save and now a pie gives me a snapshot of my aliquots inventory.

Conclusion – 05:27

That about does it for today's video on charts. Next time, we'll see those line charts in action, as well as all of our charts, when we go over building dashboards. Thanks as always for watching, see you next time.