#VB and Charts
5 messages in this thread
Hi. We're Bits Per Second, the creators of ChartBuilder. It's published in
the US by Pinnacle Publishing. We sell it direct & via distributors in
Europe. We urgently want your feedback on problems, limitations etc for
inclusion in our next release, so please be specific. As the message from
Pinnacle says, ChartBuilder's based around our Graphics Server graphing
engine, which CAN be called as a DLL from Visual Basic for more detailed
control. However, we're much more interested in providing easy-to-use
features via the Custom Control interface. Your comments are welcome – I
promise we'll take action sooner than next year!!!!
There is 1 Reply.
I too tested the Chart Builder control and found it to be unusable for my
application. I talked with the Pinnacle people about my problems. The guy
I talked to toke that info from me and I never heard from him again. My
impression of the product as a whole was very good. The biggest problems
that I found dealt with the flexibility of the line charts. I was using it
for doing scatter/xy charts. I was unable to control the scaling of the
chart. As I remember it the chart was auto scaled and there was no
programatic way to change the scale. Also, it is extremely important that
the charts can be printed from your side instead of letting VB do the
printing. VB prints a bitmap which takes too long and is not at high
enough resolution. I would appreciate any thoughts on these items.
There are 2 Replies.
Replying to Larry, Jim and Graham….
This is actually John Marsh of Bits Per Second – Graeme Knott
is more an icon for us all rather than a real person!
(actually, he does exist, but he is responsible for our DOS
products rather than our Windows products).
A major point which seems to have been overlooked –
ChartBuilder CAN print at full printer resolution. You trigger
such a print with the DrawMode property – it's fully explained
in the manual. In fact, we make a special point of mentioning
this because VB's own printing is so poor. You can also get
ChartBuilder to create a Metafile (on disk or ClipBoard) which
can be pasted into a Word document.
So far as scaling is concerned you're right – in ChartBuilder
we currently don't provide a mechanism for you to control it,
it's always automatic and sometimes doesn't do what you want.
Our next release will fix this.
Finally for now, don't forget ChartBuilder is licence-free –
15,000 copies of Excel would be rather expensive!!!
Regards… John
There is 1 Reply.
I am glad to see the addition of the scale control that you mentioned. I
would also like to see Scatter charts include LINES as a possible style.
This is most important in engineering applications. The last problem that
I had dealt with multiple series of data. Since there is only one XPosData
array for all the series there needs to be a way to handle cases where
there are a different amount of data points in each series. For example
in Excel if the cell contains #N/A the data for that cell is not used on
the chart. We have many cases where we have multiple series and there is
data missing at some points in some series. I would appreciate your
feedback on this because I desparately want to use your control. For now,
I have written my own custom control for Scatter charts, but, would like to
have all the charts available through your product.
Larry, I am trying to understand your problem. I am currently printing
line charts, scatterplots, and bar graphs, using standard VB print methods
and a few API calls. Speed is reasonably fast (16Mhz 386),
and resolution is the full 300 DPI on my postscript printer. I've even
sent some of the output to lino.
Charting packages are great, but you might want to look at doing the whole
job in VB. The code for the graphical routines I use is being published in
the new VB book from the Waite Group (I am a co-author on the book). I
believe the book is due out in January, but Mitch Waite, who sometimes
frequents this forum can give you more information.
… Dan