How Do I Use Advanced Options?

Another entry in our 'Basics' series, this article will cover how to used the Advanced Options for Chart reports in Report Toaster. 

Note - While included in our Basics series, these Advanced Options are typically intended for more sophisticated users of Report Toaster. Feel free to ask us for help! 

Chart Options

Report Toaster supports a variety of different chart types, so changing them up is quite simple.

Note that before you change a chart, you need to make sure that the checkmark is toggled 'on' besides at least one of the column headers you would like to create a chart to graph. 

For example, if I wanted the Sales by Discount Code to display 2 different charts comparing Gross Sales and Net Sales, I could toggle on both like so: 

Now suppose in this case I would like to display this data as a bar chart, with the respective fields side by side?

To do that, we need to click on More... (top right), choose Advanced... and go to Chart Options : 

From here, you then have several options: 

- Under Chart title, you can give the chart an optional title.

- Under Type, you can choose from doughnut, pie, bar or line (we'll pick bar here, for an easy side-by-side comparison).

Note - for bar charts, you will see an optional toggle for whether you want to make it stacked (one bar on top of the other) or not (bars appear side-by-side). 

- Under Height, you can select the height (in pixels) you want the chart to be. Probably about 200-400 is best to get good readability, but you can always leave that blank. 

- Under Chart Color, you can select the chart colors. Both RGB or HEX are supported, e.g. rgba(248,172,89,0.9) or #666ADF. However, most of our current dimensions and metrics are hard-coded for now and cannot be changed. 

Once you're done, hit Ok. We've selected a bar (non-stacked) and now our data looks like this: 

By displaying our data as a bar chart, we can draw comparisons more easily between two different attributes.

Table Options 

Table Options let you customize the results of the table underneath the chart. 

Strictly speaking, most of these options can be adjusted on the reports themselves (e.g. adjusting the number of items per page at the bottom), but this is slightly easier to adjust for more complex reports.

Here your options are as follows: 

- Under Items per page, you can choose how many rows you want to be displayed on the table for a report. Normally your options under a table are limited to 5, 10, 25 or 100 rows per page of a report, but this is useful if you need a very specific number (e.g. 30 rows because you are compiling a top-30 products list or something). 

- Under Allow multi-sort, this toggle simply decides whether your report will have multiple sort levels (e.g. Sort by Column X, THEN by column Y) or not. It is on by default, but you can always toggle it off if you want to remove this option. 

Gaps in Dates

This functionality is useful if you want to compare two sets of data, but skip the dates with blank values in between.

For instance, suppose I looked at this modified version of a 30-day Sales Summary report, and expanded to cover Sales over the last year in a monthly breakdown: 

Now suppose I want to compare only my sales between Q1 and Q3 last year, but leave out Q2 and Q4 (for whatever reason).

I can do that by introducing a filter, but this leaves gaps in the report like so: 

However, this is easy to resolve.

Click the More... button (top right) and go to Advanced...

From here, you can go to where it says 'Gaps in Dates' and choose one of the following options:

 

- Fill with zeroes. This is the default option, and fills any gaps in the time span with 0 values (as applicable). 

- Open gaps. This works the same for the table, but effectively leaves any gaps open on the chart. This is mainly used to avoid having lines drawn between values on the chart (perhaps because it could be misleading).

 

- Span gaps. This tells the chart/table to effectively 'skip over' any gaps, so they aren't displayed on the table or the chart. 

Notice that now, it goes straight from Jan-March 2024 to Jul-Sept 2024

Span gaps is incredibly useful if you want to limit your comparison to a certain range.

For example, you might be looking to compare your holiday sales in 2021 vs. those in 2020, and want to exclude rows or chart entries for all the data in between. 

Report Time Zone 

Report lets you change the Time Zone on an individual report. 

For example, suppose I have a team that operates on Mountain Time (US) but I am located in Germany.

This would let me set a specific time zone for this report, so that when I export it to them (or even setup a Scheduled Report), it uses their applicable date/time. 

Click the More... button (top right) and go to Advanced...

From the time zone dropdown, you can then set the appropriate time zone for this individual report: 

  

Hit okay and that's it.

Sort Options

Finally, under the Advanced menu, you also have Sort options at the bottom: 

 

Here you can see which columns it is sorting by.

- If you have multiple sorts, you can use the arrows to change the order (i.e. in this case it is sorting by Gross Sales descending, then Net Sales descending) 

- You can click the pencil 'edit' button to edit which Column(s) you want the data to be sorted by and the Direction (ascending vs descending). 

- Next to that, you can click the trashcan icon to delete a particular sort option.

- Finally, above that, you can click the + button to add a new Sort level.  

Hit Ok when you're done. 

This sort functionality is very similar to the basic Sort options covered in our other article, except that you might find this interface easier to work with for complex multi-sorts. 

For other articles in our Basic Guides series, check out our main section here.

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