Ideas

Scheduler: Moved task Up/Down

bgrovens — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:31:20 -0400

Hi Visokio,

If you open the Visokio Scheduler to the main window, you only have the option to add, edit, and remove the task. Please refer to the below screenshot.

I would like to be able to move the chains up or down to get them in the correct order. I find that moving around directly in the config.xml file is time consuming and unsafe from a production standpoint. Can you please add the up/down to the top level page as you already have created under the chain action window per the below screenshot.

Thanks for the help,
Brian

Ideas: Printing - page breaks to split pages by panes?

vthiruv2 — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:18:03 -0400

Is it possible to add page breaks if we split bar/line graphs by horizontal pane? I understand that this can be done using the Multipage document view, but you would still need to create each individual view and filter by query for each category. I would like to avoid that manual effort since the data could be dynamic.

Better support for symbol fonts

steve — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 05:39:39 -0400

Attempting to use symbol fonts (such as "Wingdings" in Windows) results in square rectangles or incorrect characters appearing in Omniscope. This occurs throughout - for example, in cell data, field names, the Content view, and view footers.

This is because Omniscope only supports the Unicode character set, whereas Wingdings (and others such as Webdings and Wingdings3) are not Unicode fonts.

Copying and pasting characters from non-Unicode fonts in Windows "Character Map" results in the wrong character pasted, because the Omniscope incorrectly interprets the pasted characters as Unicode.

In Windows "Character Map", you can tell a font is non-Unicode because the status bar doesn't show the Unicode character code such as "U+0021". Instead it shows an internal character code such as "Character Code: 0x21".

(Further, the font menus in Omniscope show the name of symbol fonts incorrectly, attempting to display them using the font itself, which does not contain glyphs for the characters in the font name. Such fonts should be listed in the menu using another font, plus example glyphs present in the font itself.)

Known workarounds for inserting symbol characters into Omniscope:

Use Unicode symbols in normal/other fonts
1. In Windows "Character Map", select "Font: Arial Unicode MS" and "Group by: Unicode Subrange".
2. In the "Group By" popup that appears, choose "Symbols & Dingbats" (or "Arrows", etc., as required).
3. Now select and copy characters as usual into Omniscope.
4. Depending on the font and symbol choice, the symbols may display immediately; if not, switch Omniscope to use Arial Unicode MS. You can do this throughout Omniscope using "Settings > File font" or individually in a Content view or other rich text field.
Insert character codes in symbol fonts (rich text fields only)
1. In Windows "Character Map", select the symbol font, e.g. Wingdings.
2. Click the symbol you want - e.g. the 2nd symbol (✂, "black scissors").
3. In the status bar at the bottom, note the character code - e.g. 0x22.
4. In the Omniscope rich text field (e.g. the Content view), start editing.
5. Enter some arbitrary text, e.g. "X", and set the font for "X" e.g. to Wingdings ("X" may appear as a rectangle).
6. Click the "<> Edit Html Source" icon, and replace "X" with "" for code 0x22, "" for code 0x23, etc.
  (This is a special "private use area" Unicode character code range for non-Unicode fonts, in hexadecimal).
7. Click the "<> Edit Html Source" icon again to switch back to rich text editing.
Convert Wingdings codes to Unicode (rich text fields only)
1. In Windows "Character Map", select the symbol font, e.g. Wingdings.
2. Click the symbol you want - e.g. the 2nd symbol (✂, "black scissors").
3. In the status bar at the bottom, note the character code - e.g. 0x22.
4. Visit this table and look up the code (e.g. 22) in the Hex column. Check the "Chr" column, and note the "Code" column. For example, 0x22 maps to code 9986.
  (This is the Unicode character code, in decimal.)
5. In the Omniscope rich text field (e.g. the Content view), start editing.
6. Enter some arbitrary text, e.g. "X". You may also need to set the font for "X" to "Arial Unicode MS".
7. Click the "<> Edit Html Source" icon, and replace "X" with "✂" for symbol code 0x22 / Unicode 9986, etc.
8. Click the "<> Edit Html Source" icon again to switch back to rich text editing.

This idea comprises some or all of:

Detecting symbol fonts pasted from "Character Map", and automatically inserting the correct codes and fonts/styles, as appropriate / where possible, in the Content View and other rich-text and plain-text fields.
An "Insert symbol/character" button/dialog within Omniscope rich text editors, similar to "Character Map", showing all symbols available in a given font.
Automatically correcting keystrokes which normally insert symbols in Wingdings, etc., in other applications such as Word, so they are converted/mapped to the equivalent Unicode in Omniscope (if possible).
Correcting the display of symbol font names in font menus.

Idea: More De-pivot flexibility re: column/field headers?

edtclarke — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:03:56 -0500

It would be useful to have the option, once you've pulled data into DataManager, to nominate a row as the header row. This would mean that you could then manipulate the headers dynamically (with formulae etc).

Bullet Graphs

kmatrix999 — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:13:14 -0400

Apologies if this has been raised elsewhere.

We use dials to show values within ranges, but from what I have read and experienced elsewhere, bullet graphs appear to offer more flexible, visually attractive and compact options. Do you intend to incorporate bullet graphs in the future, or am I over- rating their importance?

Idea: Bullet Graphs

earheart — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 08:43:10 -0400

As you look to add more graph types, one of my favorite are bullet graphs. They allow you to present a ton of information in a limited amount of space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_graph

Database Connector

daniel — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 06:26:17 -0500

If possible I would like to see another page on the connector which would let you tick database table fields much like the Filter page on the connector. I know you can customise the SQL code to pull in only the fields you want but a tick box system would be much faster especially if you have a database with a lot of columns and you haven't memorised every column name.

I currently tend to pull in all fields and then delete fields I don't want with the field organiser operation downstream of the connector.

Different Security Levels by Views/Tabs/Restrictions

daniel — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 06:37:57 -0400

I would like to be able to secure parts of my data whereas allow other sections of it to be exportable. Currently it seems I can only lock the whole file or not at all.

What I would like to achieve is to have a report which has multiple types of data such as location of venues & sales transaction figures. As you can imagine transaction information can be highly sensitive and needs to be protected.

As such I would like to secure only the data regarding Sales Transactions but allow users to be able to export out a list of locations.

If I am able to restrict by one of the following then it would pretty much cover what I need.

- Field Contents i.e. If Transactions data then Hide
- Block Particular Columns from being Exported i.e. If Columns are Costs or Revenue
- Disable Export View function per tab or individual view

Fixing 2 differnet Y axis value ranges independent of the data

rajeshbalu29 — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 03:03:11 -0500

Hi,

Can we have a manual scale value's for both right and the left Y axis. Please find the attached snapshot for your reference.

Regards
Rajesh B

Ability to specify or fix maximum y-axis values for bar charts

Paul — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:00:38 -0500

I have a tab containing multiple bar chart views which all contain related data but of wildly differing values. For this particular tab, it doesn't make sense to combine all the bar charts into one.

Currently, as it is not possible to specify or fix the maximum y-axis values, the bar charts will automatically scale to the maximum value. As the bar chart data is related to each other (they contain sales data by year for similar products), the bar charts are visually confusing as they appear to show that sales for the various products are of a similar level even though some are much higher than others.

It would be very useful to be able to specify the maximum y-axis value and fix it the same for each of the bar charts so that it is much more obvious which product sales are higher.

Differentiating lines

vthiruv2 — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 08:55:01 -0400

Is there a way to change the shape of the lines in a Bar/Line graph so that we can differentiate it better? This will greatly help with printed reports (Black and white) . I am wondering if there's a way to either add different shaped markers or have dotted or dashed lines. Please see attached sample file(s).

Vijay

Calculating and plotting mean before view aggregation

alexandervolk — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 10:18:18 -0400

I would like to use a formula to calculate the mean of a measure that is plotted on a bar/line view. The measure is split by category and using subset formulas only calculates the mean by split.

Is there any way to calculate the total mean independent of split and plot it on the same axis? See screenshot attached for a better explanation.

Thanks in advance!
Alex

Additional options with query

andy_white — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 05:39:35 -0400

Hi guys,

2 requests!

Firstly - with the "create query" option, you can do either filters or selection, however selection isn't the "true" selection as it takes the filters provided as well (for example, I've got a nhs dataset with mutiple sources (a+e episodes, hospital stays) and I want to filter and look at just people with multiple a+e admissions in the last 6 months - when I've done this, I want to create a query of these individuals (literally just the nhs numbers) - if I do this by aggregating a table view by nhs number, select them all, create query from selection, it will add all of them to the query but also add the filters - is it possible to have the option to ONLY add the selected data?)

Secondly - is it possible to have the option to create queries in data manager?

Andy

Idea: Standardise values block?

daniel — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 04:13:06 -0400

I am quite interested in the proposed operation for matching up by Steve from another thread. I can see how quickly this would address match up problems rather then slow iterations with Search and replace. I definitely think this would save time for people with data integration problems as well as making the process much simpler.

I do have one more suggestion though is that the match up would allow for Many to One scenarios as I have encountered examples where an area name match up would be many to one as a number of areas merged into a single area i.e:

Old Name of Areas :Chester-le-Street, Derwentside, Durham, Easington, Sedgefield, Teesdale, Wear Valley

Which are all now grouped up as just County Durham due to UK parliamentary boundary changes. On the whole the UK has been shrinking the number of areas so often you may get an outdated list with "extra" areas names than the current UK parliament boundaries list.

Original comment taken from a different thread:

This is quite a common problem, but not one which the merge/join block should attempt to solve. Fuzzy matching won't help here. For example, some common value mismatches, most of which you can't solve with fuzzy matching:

- US, USA, United States, US of A, America
- Cardiff, Caerdydd, Cardiff/Caerdydd
- Russia, Russian Federation
- London, Londres
- GB, UK, United Kingdom, Britain, Great Britain, British Isles
etc.

Currently you have to use a Search/Replace block to manage these, which is very tedious to configure. You can use merge/join to identify unique mismatches, then auto-generate a Search/Replace configuration based on those mismatches, but you are still going to have to manually locate each right-side value for each missing left-side value.

A possible solution is a new kind of block, "Standardise values". It would have two inputs: (1) the main data (2) the lookup file. You would pick a field from each side, much as you do in merge/join. It would then enumerate all unique values from left that are missing from right, with searchable drop-downs to pick the correct mapping. It would result in the main data from the left, with all values standardised according to the right file.

Idea: Batch Reporting-specifying tabs in batch output?

ken — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 15:12:32 -0400

I am creating different batch output Omniscope files with specific subsets of data.

I would ideally like to run from one master Omniscope file and select the appropriate tabs for the output files I create as not all are relevant for all subsets of data.

I could do this by creating multiple templates but as each template would share common tabs this is sub-optimal.

There is a field in the batch template for tabs which only seems to apply for PDF and PowerPoint output - why not also for Omniscope output files? Is there a way to achieve my aims?

Configurable mouse-over colour?

Patricia — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 05:53:22 -0400

I made a Map view with data points that are represented by a bubble as marker. When I hover over the marker/bubble the marker color changes into pink. Is it possible somewhere in the settings to change the hovering color into an other color?
I need the color pink for a different item - Thanks, Patricia

Report analysis tool

ygulla — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 08:10:49 -0400

I would like to see a field summary for the whole Omniscope report. It should show the report designers the distribution of fields used in different tabs. By "used" I mean participating in queries, active filters and view settings.

So for the attached basic Omniscope file the output would look something like:
----- Filters ---- Queries --- Views
Tab 1: Tier ------ None ----- Market Price, Ticker
Tab 2: Category -- None ----- Category, Issue Date, Isin

This would enable thinning down the report after the initial development stage and tracing the impact of the input data changes (such as database field format change) on the particular report.

Secondly, it would be very useful to see the field dependency tree (for formulas) for the same purpose of finding the fields that are not used anymore.

I can imagine this being implemented as a new data manager block that takes an Omniscope file as an input and produces the above report. Would this be possible one way or another at all?

PS A bit of background: We have a large (30 tabs) report created a while ago. It was changed organically for months and was created using a not very speed efficient principle of "let's get all the data in and see what we can do with it". All the database tables were imported using "SELECT *" statements and unused formulas were rarely deleted. This resulted in about 450 fields in the final report. I bet half of them are not needed, so it's time to optimise it, and currently the fastest way to do that is to recreate the report from scratch, and even that will take a good few days. I'm sure it's not an uncommon scenario and the suggested tool would help immensely.

Idea: Text Display - auto-convert links in text?

steve — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 07:22:20 -0400

When you have a link embedded in text such as http://www.visokio.com this link should be detected and automatically turned into a link, exactly as it is done in this Forum post.

Should apply to:
- Table view cells
- Details view
- Popup details
- Content view
- Tab annotations
- View footers
- Document layout
- Cover/back/help pages

Idea: Pivot View 2- formatting options?

schergr — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:17:54 -0400

How is the Pivot 2 view coming? The capability is great, just wondering if you might be adding formatting features for font sizes, etc... as it current is kinda ugly ;)

I know..l know, it's still experimental, but you can't expect to keep us away from great stuff like this ;)

Transform static data using formula [formula on a column]

schergr — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 10:54:58 -0400

is it possible to have a column which is set with a default value (as a result of a join) AND a formula. The forumla is an if...then..else which either leaves the value at the "default" or changes it based on the if..then else??? Or, do I need a sep col with the formula to do that?

Idea: Tile View - color legend size

davidkatz — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 05:35:05 -0400

Hi- In the Tile View, is it possible to resize the color legend? When the text is more then around 12 characters it gets cutoff and "..." added. I would gladly sacrifice some real estate to get the full legend displayed.
Thanks! -Dave

Ideas: Manage Fields - Import/Export/Share custom category colour palettes?

indranildatta — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:22:46 -0500

Hi,

Is there a way to create a custom colour palette with specific colours? Right now, we can only specify one or more colour families in the custom palette section in "Data Colours" and Omniscope generates a palette. What if I know the exact RGB values of the colours I want in the palette?

Cheers!
Indranil

Embedding custom fonts [Custom fonts available via web start?]

swallace — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:01:34 -0500

Hi there

I've created a dashboard using a font that isn't bundled with Omniscope, and when it's accessed via web start the font settings disappear. Please could someone advise how to rectify this? Does the dashboard need to be deployed via Commercial Publisher to maintain the 'new' font?

Thanks

Scott.

Idea: Dynamic FTP feed links?

sherriff — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:55:57 -0500

We would like to be able to download PDFs or other files via FTP from a web URL which is generated dynamically within Omniscope, just like the current dynamic web links, for example:

ftp://ftp.[domain.com]/[field1]/[field2].zip

and put the results into a folder of files with any tags/metadata importable and manageable using Omniscope.

Field level timestamping / formula

schergr — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 10:39:30 -0500

Is it possible to create a field that contains a timestamp that reflects when it was last "touched"? The Today function only give m/d/y, not h:m:s as well. I tried to look at the existing functions, but couldn't work out the best way to do this. Thoughts?

Multiple Axes

hgross — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:48:05 -0500

I have an idea for a type of chart that would be cool in Omniscope:

Sometimes dual axes charts can be confusing when trying to figure out which measure is on which axis. Also, if you have three measures (the third axis being independent), it's even harder.

Can we have a view that puts all of the axes on one side and plots the lines on their own scale? The lines would be color coded to align with the scale.

(Pic attached)

Thanks!

Variables: Editing in DM Field Organiser vs Data> Formulas?

naruemon — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:11:08 -0500

We note that we are currently unable to view or use Variable fields from within the DataManager > Field Organiser > use formula edit function?

We can only view and use Variables within the Data > Manage Fields or Formula interfaces? This does not seem to be wholly convenient since we appear to lose any formulae when we load Omniscope from a new box.

It would be most helpful if Variables were accessible within the DataManager > Field Organiser > Use formula field so that they can be preserved.

Adding additional criterion to pick a period: Google Analytics connector

indranildatta — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 08:14:31 -0500

Could we have an additional criterion along with the options "last one week", "last one month" etc to define when the week or month starts. The ideas we've had so far are:

1. Adding additional options like "working week", "working month"
2. Adding a starting point along with the period length "week", "month" etc

Also, can the concept be extended to other connectors?

Cheers!
Indranil

SPSS Files

shaji_o — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:11:59 -0500

Hi,

Can Omniscope handle SPSS files, including the formats and label details? One of our clients uses SPSS and was inquiring about importing SPSS data into Omniscope to incorporate with the rest of their reporting.

Thanks

Grouping Value Function "LIST" in Table View

alexandervolk — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 05:58:00 -0500

In a table view, sometimes it is necessary to display all sub-field values of a grouped field to put the grouped data in proper context.

Would it be possible to add "list" to the grouping value functions and have the view list all grouped sub-fields to display "a, b, c, etc..." instead of singleton or mode?

Thanks!
Alex