Stephen Few is a visualization expert and the author of some books on the topic including 'Show Me the Numbers'.<br />
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Last year he had a competion to design a dashboard on class performance based on data he provided. The winner was announce last year (
http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1374). I was challenged by my manager to build the winning dashboard from the competition last year in BIRT (Disclaimer: I am an Actuate employee) as Stephen Few was presenting at our customer days. As one would expect I was not given much warning (asked Monday night, needed to deliver by Wednesday). As I always love a challenge of course I said no problem. Below is a link to a live report.<br />
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http://poc.actuate.com/few/winner<br />
Stephen has published his own solution (
http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1466). I thought I would build that too (was a bit more challenging). Again below is a link to a live report.<br />
http://poc.actuate.com/few/stephen<br />
I am attaching the designs of the reports. The data is included in the project (using relative file paths) so you should be able to run this. <br />
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My blog post with images can be found here:
http://www.birt-exchange.org/org/forum/index.php/blog/17/entry-485-stephen-few-student-performance-dashboard-using-birt/<br />
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There is one caveat. The report desing 'Class Dashboard Few' uses images as markers. Since the reports use HTML5 the images are on a website. In my case I put the images under iportal/images/few. If you put the images in the same location you can edit the xml soure and change localhost:8900/iporta/images/few to the location where you place the images.
