Visualization is SharePoint - Your options

SharePoint is a bit of a “kitchen sink” product. It offers a huge range of functionality - from document management, to forms and workflows… it will even act as a good old fashioned website CMS. Its power is in this versatility. In the right hands it can be made to meet all sorts of varied requirements. This strength, however, can be a weakness if implemented haphazardly. Simply put, there are a number of different ways of solving most problems. So how do you know you have the right one?

Take data visualization as an example. There are a number of ways to display data in an effective and readable format using SharePoint. A few methods you might wish to use are listed below. A good SharePoint project will use a mix of these (on others) in its implementation.

The humble list
Lists are at the heart of a lot of what SharePoint does (even if SharePoint 2013 has relabeled some of them apps). Using the powerful concept of Views, data can be displayed in a wide range of suitable formats. Columns can be displayed or hidden, reordered, and the style of output can be reformatted with reasonable flexibility.

Excel services
Introduced in SharePoint 2010, Excel services lets you put a live datasheet on a SharePoint page. This datasheet can display almost anything (there are exceptions) that the desktop app can create. Excel has long been a tool for data visualization, and Excel services brings it a little closer to SharePoint.

Chart and graph web parts
Tools like our own NetAdvantage for SharePoint allow you to hook up SharePoint data (e.g. a list) to bespoke web parts design to display data in its most suitable form. NetAdvantage includes charts, maps, and gauges. This option gives you the power of Excel type charting, but in a much more native interactive SharePoint implementation. Download a free trial to explore the features and functionality of NetAdvantage for SharePoint today!