Afternoon all,

This is quite a broad/generic question but wanted to know if anybody has some good tips/tricks when it comes to formatting a Graph's data labels.

I'm sure everybody has experienced the same issue; you create a graph in a report and there is so much data the data labels squeeze up so much they are useless!

So what do you do to resolve the issue? I know there is the option to 'Skip Group Labels' but what if you have graphs by group and there is more data for one group than the other - then you'll have to manually 'Skip Group Labels' for each group (potentially every month if data fluctuates).

Even if there isn't a different amount of data sometimes the difference in time between the data labels can be so large (10 Hours +) that they are useless anyway..

Does anybody have some good tips that they use when working with Graphs?

Is there the ability to have a graph with a small number of data labels and then have a 'drill' capability to see a smaller time frame and see the actual time of a peak, for example, and investigate it further??

Hey DBlank,

Thanks for your reply and apologies for the delay in my response.

'Drill down' in the sense of using the Crystal Reports application or Crystal Report Viewer is not really an option.

What I was referencing when I mentioned the "amount of data inside a group" was an example like the following:

1) A script runs every 15 minutes which logs out a Computers CPU utilisation to a database.

2) That database is then connected to Crystal and a report is generated for a month.

As the data is being captured for every 15 minutes the number of data labels will be too big to display on a graph.

Some systems may experience down-time, and thus the data will not be captured for a period of time, so setting all graphs to 'skip group labels = static value' will provide inconsistent results.

I also don't want to have average values (i.e. per day/hour/ AM and PM).

There may be no solution but I wondered if anyone has any tips/tricks they use for graphs....

I was just looking for people's tips/tricks for how they manage this situation.

But if the scenario you have described is possible then that would be ideal! So have the actual graph show CPU utilisation every 15 minutes and have the data labels show when it has spiked.

I don't necessarily need to see every data point; as you say this will make the data labels unreadable due to the amount of them.

It would be fine to only show a certain amount but my question is for tips/tricks on how people achieve this. As my graph forms part of a group a static 'Skip Group Labels' isn't sufficient.

For example is there a way to tell Crystal Report to skip as many as it feels is necessary?

I only want the data labels to be grouped by a specific time though - I still want the graph to display data every 15 minutes.