Charts & the View As Menu
Turn any report into one of twelve chart forms, and read the insight panels that come with it — without ever leaving the figures behind.
Every report opens as a table. View as swaps that one dataset into a different form — the same server-computed figures, drawn a different way. Nothing is recalculated: a bar is a number the table already showed.
The Thirteen Views
| View | Good for |
|---|---|
| Table | The default. Every row, every column, every total. |
| Bar chart | Ranked categories read left to right — long names stay legible. |
| Column chart | Ranked categories or a short time series. |
| Pie chart | Share of a whole, top six slices. |
| Donut | Share of a whole with the total in the middle. |
| Line | A figure over time. |
| Area | A figure over time with the volume beneath it. |
| Pareto | Ranked bars with the cumulative curve — the 80/20 read. |
| Radial | A small ranked set as arcs. |
| Treemap | Many categories at once, sized by value. |
| Funnel | A descending sequence. |
| Progress | Each row as a filled bar against the largest. |
| Cards | Each row as a tile — a handful of values read at a glance. |
A pie or donut draws the top six rows; the other chart forms draw the ranked set the report returned. The table always holds everything.
What a Chart View Actually Shows
Switching away from Table does not just redraw the rows — the report is rendered as an insight page, with cards above and one panel per dimension below. What you get depends on the shape of the report:
| Report | The insight page |
|---|---|
| Sales Summary and Purchases Summary | Up to five cards — Total revenue or Total spend, Transactions, Average transaction, Quantity, and Customers or Vendors — then Revenue over time (or Spend over time), then a panel each for By center, By customer or vendor, By item and By project. |
| Profit and Loss over a single period | Revenue, Gross profit, Net income and Total costs cards, then the Profit & loss bridge, Income composition and Cost & expense composition. |
| Any statement with period columns — multi-period P&L, Balance Sheet or Trial Balance comparisons, Cash Flow, Changes in Equity | Cards for the closing column, then Key lines over periods, Period comparison, Statement composition and a Summary lines table. |
| Everything else — registers, by-X summaries, lists | The report's own totals as cards, then the rows drawn in the form you chose. |
Each panel carries its own small View as control, so one panel can be a donut while the one beside it stays a bar — without changing the page-level choice.
A dimension panel shows the leading rows, not all of them. The whole set is in the table and in every export. A chart is a way of noticing something; the table is where you check it.
Charts in Exports
| Output | Charts |
|---|---|
| PDF export | The charts on screen when you press Export are captured and rendered on trailing pages — up to twelve of them. |
| The same PDF, opened with the print dialog. | |
| Excel and CSV | Table only. A spreadsheet gets the numbers; you draw your own. |
| Emailed PDF, sent now | Carries the charts on screen, exactly as an export would. |
| Scheduled PDF | No screen exists when a schedule fires, so the delivered PDF carries the report's own generated bar chart rather than the one you were looking at. |
When a Chart Cannot Be Drawn
A panel with nothing to draw says so rather than rendering an empty frame. On a report with no rows in the period, the insight page reads Nothing recorded for this period — This report is working — it just has nothing to show yet. If that looks wrong, check that the documents for these dates have been entered and posted (drafts don't count), and that a filter or center isn't narrowing everything out.
The General Ledger's Hide disabled accounts switch, the aging controls, and the Show top selector are drawn only in Table view. Switch to a chart and they leave the page — along with the effect they were having on what you see. Switch back to Table to change them.
Related
- The control itself, in the toolbar: Reading a report.
- Getting the chart out of the browser: Exporting a report.
- The card-based reading of the whole business: Reporting hub.