Trellis and Boxplot critical limitation: long labels

[Henry Heberle]

Lots of research data at Crop Science is associated to dosages, units, date-codes, and product names that need to be displayed under the graphics (e.g., under each box in a box plot, under each column in a trellis scatterplot, etc), but our users can't see the labels in Spotfire because the trellis/box-plot won't break the line like the bar chart does for the x-axis. Those strings are concatenated so that to distinguish products with the same name and different dosages, for example, and so on. Due to complexity, it's not possible to use trellis to create some type of hierarchy... they really need to be concatenated in a long string. E.g. xxxxxxx xx xxxx xxxxxx xxxx xxxxx.

Even scatterplot can do that, however, if I want to calculate average per categorical values from x-axis, I will actually need to use trellis, which again... breaks the visualization because we can't see the labels. This means that basically all visualizations from Spotfire are compromised by the limitation once we start needing to use trellis.

We have at the same time different queries, so every time we will have different labels. This means that we can't simply replace those labels with A, B, C... H, I, J... and create a complicated legend for every query our hundred Analytst users do in their daily activities (they manage their dashboards, using our base dashboard as a starting point).

Their solution is to abandon Spotfire and get back to Excel, where they have more flexibility.

Is there any way to solve this limitation in the current Spotfire? Or is there any update to come to solve these limitations?

We are having more and more users motivated to learn Spotfire, but as soon as they hit this type of limitation, they run back to Excel. I'd really like to see such limitations being overcome somehow, but I couldn't find any solution.

[Fredrik Rosell]

Hello Henry,

Thank you for raising this! First of all, it's very important to raise issues like this one (basically anything that is an idea/enhancement) in the Ideas portal - https://ideas.tibco.com/ - as the ideas/votes from there are a very important factor in the decisions on what to implement/address in coming releases. I have alerted Spotfire Product Management about your issue now as well, but I strongly recommend creating an idea.

For potential workarounds, to make sure your issue is well understood by the people here in the community that may be able to suggest something, it could help if you post a screenshot illustrating the issue

[Arnaud Varin]

Hello Henry,

Clear, readable labels is critical for visual analysis. This is an area that we plan on improving. Thanks you for the detailed feedback. I took the liberty of adding it as an idea in the Ideas portal. You can find it here: https://ideas.tibco.com/ideas/TS-I-9311

Please vote for this idea. By creating and voting for ideas you make your voice heard and you will get notified automatically when status change. We - product managers - review ideas every day and we used to reach out directly to make sure we understand the use case and the problem you are trying to solve with the submitted idea.

[Henry Heberle]

Thanks so much for taking the time and considering the feedback! I voted and added a comment there.

This is really affecting our projects and now with Python for Excel... It's difficult not to think about a possible change for some automated generation of graphics for our users.

I'm also considering creating Mods... But it takes a time that I'm not having atm. And it would be challenging rebuilding the basic visualisations from Spotire to deal with the limitations that are affecting our users and their use cases.

Thanks again for the reply and consideration!

[Matt Stahl]

Hi Henry,

I believe you have access to Lead Discovery Premium (LDP) from Revvity Signals. If so, please have a look at the Distribution Chart that comes with LDP -- it handles long labels just fine. The Distribution Chart uses 'grouping' to show distributions side-by-side instead of a trellis. Feel free to message me directly if you need additional details.