Am I right in thinking that charts in Glide are really poor?
My use case is very simple: I have a table of data showing form submissions. One column is a date column, being the date of submission of the form.
All I want to do is report the number of submissions (Y Axis), i.e. a count, by the date received (X Axis). However, there’s no simple option to summarise data in the Y Axis by count (it is trying, e.g., to sum the Row ID if I select Row ID) and for the X Axis it picks each single date and time entry, there’s no easy way to bucket the data say by month.
I have looked into this on the community and the answer seems to live somewhere in building an (as yet) undefined helper table to summarise the data I need per date, but that is going to need some (as yet) undefined logic to permit a dynamic period (e.g. say the last 24 months) and in any case anything I define in the helper table will be a limitation; it isn’t going to be easy for an app user to expand beyond those parameters (e.g. show me that last 60 months instead of 24 months).
Notwithstanding the above, if the answer to simple chart queries lies in complex setups the documentation is really poor - the only article I can find covers all charts and offers very little guidance (Charts | Glide Docs).
All of this seems very complex for something that should be really simple. Given how powerful Glide is across the board, and easy to use in many respects, I’m at a loss.
Am I missing something, or is this really a part of the software that doesn’t receive any love?
So do you mean you want to group the X axis by date, or by month?
Seems like you’re trying to point the X axis to a date/time column that can contain different values in hours and minutes. On the front end it can look the same, but underlying values are difference, hence they result in different bars.
You might want to try using a template column, have a replacement like {D} and point that directly to the date/time column to lock the format in, before using it for your X axis.
For the months part, I would try using a Format Date column.
I’ve tried using a Format Date column to create the ‘bucket’, but Glide doesn’t recognise this as an option for the X-Axis. The original date is there (which, as you suggest, means every single minute/hour time gets it’s own data point) but the Format Date column is not.
It is a Glide Big Table and the preview feature (use computed columns) is selected for the team.
I should add your response is very helpful in that it highlights you don’t need to specify a Y-Axis item - i.e. simply state the X-Axis and then the default is to count.
I’m not sure if this is obvious to most people, but it wasn’t to me and the documentation seemed to be silent on it!
Unfortunately, reinforcing my grumpiness about the state of charts in Glide; the need for a formatted column (rather than ability to bucket by day / week / month etc. in the Layout UI) in the first place is a major drawback, let alone the specific restriction in respect of Big Tables.
Just venting - it’s such a shame as the rest of the kit is excellent.
Need to research Quickchart in the meantime, but looks like it is very complex. Also looking into synchronising our data with an external SQL database - will double as a backup as well as warehouse for other MI tools.
