Small multiple FTW?

#1

So, I am curious - would some people using Dundas for longer then I have give me some examples of how you’re using small multiples? I understand that this is a way to view data that is less complicated then using one chart to show it, but also thinking about the amount of space it takes up and wondering in what circumstances it might be “best practices” to use them…

So, who is using small multiples on their live dashboards and reports? And what to end users think of them? And what has been your most effective use of them?

Any and all info is helpful, I’d love to here anything you are experiencing with using them. Thanks!

#2

Hey Heather,

To get you started, here’s a great blog on Small Multiples in Dundas BI >>>

We cover what Small Multiples are, provide some examples we’ve seen on the Internet, and talk about when they’re best used. We then dive into creating Small Multiples in Dundas BI using both the default and advanced designers and include examples of both.

Looking forward to seeing what others have built as well! :ok_hand:

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#3

@heather
Small Multiples just came out with version 6, so it is new to all of us.
I work at a company with many subsidiaries, so one thing I did was group by subsidiaries things like employee count and some other HR stats.
This way there is a small chart for each company on each metric. I also made it so when you click on that chart it goes to a bigger version of that chart and from there a detail report (table chart).

basically if you are making a visualization and you have a main filter, that might be a good place to try out small multiples. Instead of having to filter and remember what the other filters told you, you can just have them all on one screen.

I hope I made sense i am on morphine for after surgery pain.

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#4

yea, this does sound cool and appreciate the real world example. Thank you for the info.

#5

Thanks! This is helpful.

#6

I used small multiples to make Dundas easier on my DB. i wanted to display 3 graphs showing the same type of data but from 3 different tables. My DB (Hive) has a high latency, and firing 1 query gathering data for the 3 graphs is about as fast as getting data for only 1 graph. With a proper result structure, I could then plug this metric set into the small multiples and have my 3 graphs fed from one query only.

A caveat for me is that you do not have much control over the display of the actual small multiples. I wanted them to use 100% of the width and 33% of the height, but you can only hardcode sizes.

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#7

To Guillaume’s point about scorecards, reports and small multiples being fixed sized, this is certainly the case today. There is an existing feature request to change the behaviour.

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#8

Thanks Jeff, that’s nice, I hope this feature will make its way to production soon :slight_smile:

#9

We use small multiple in nice example to present the teachers in universites , we have used a hierarchy to build the structure of universites to colleagues to sections .
Then we build our visualization in small multiple to show some statistics and we put the hierarchy as column in it and enable the drill down feature.

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#10

We use them to display histograms for multiple production lines. For example, histograms for cycle times, number of pieces per hour, etc. Gives a one page view for all machines for a particular metric.

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#11

oh! That sounds useful. cool.

#12

I’ve used small multiples to show many different slices of the same data set - i.e. doing some kind of comparison by category with similar x and y axes.

For example what product line combinations are the most profitable or most expensive.

Sometimes you can achieve the same “answer” by just using bar charts, but once you have many categories, the bar chart might become overwhelmed. Small multiples are really great when you are doing multiple category analysis across the same quantitative variable.

Plus, the concept was invented by Ed Tufte, so it must be good.

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