Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Visual Insights, Inc.

Paul Davies

Jeff Couckuyt

Randall L Davis

Jason Matthew Cahill

Sandra L Loop

A formatting object according to the present invention conveys information to the reader of a document (such as a table or chart) by associating visual attributes (such as color, fill type, border width, line width, line style, font size, marker size and marker type) to characters or markers within the document. The formatting object may be used to emphasize data within a table or a chart by modifying the structural visual attributes of characters or markers within the table or chart according to pre-defined criteria. Similarly, the formatting object may be used to increase information density within a table or chart, and to elegantly represent the relationships between four or more interrelated variables in a two-dimensional chart. The formatting object accomplishes this by defining at least one format map that comprises one or more mapping segments. Each mapping segment includes a beginning boundary value, an ending boundary value, at least one beginning visual attribute corresponding to the beginning boundary value, and at least one ending visual attribute corresponding to the ending boundary value. The formatting object uses the information within the format maps, in combination with interpolation techniques, to determine one or more visual attributes that correspond to data points falling within the various mapping segments. The formatting object then expresses the data values by applying the appropriate visual attribute to a visual object displayed on a computer screen.

Formatting object for modifying the visual attributes of visual objects to reflect data values

A drag-and-drop user interface (DDUI) can generate multiple charts in an integrated chart report and supports the drag-and-drop method of adding fields to the integrated chart report. When a field is dropped from a field list into a multiple chart drop zone, the DDUI will automatically generate additional charts to represent the data in the dropped field. An additional chart will be generated for each unique entry in a data field. The number of charts can be modified by selecting particular elements in the dropped field, by means of a drop-down menu. The drop-down menu enables the elimination or addition of elements of the dropped field. Each additional field dropped into the multiple chart drop zone will add a chart to the chart report. Conversely, each field dragged out of the multiple chart drop zone will eliminate a chart from the chart report. The DDUI can accommodate various chart types. The multiple chart drop zone can be slightly modified to accommodate the specialized needs of various chart types, for example, x-y, bubble, bar, and pie chart types.

Multiple chart user interface

A method and system for the interactive visualization and examination of data displays a set of data with graphics primitives, corresponding to attributes of the data set, in a rendered visualization. The set of data is arranged in the rendering with data items grouped in a set of ranges of data values, referred to as buckets. A user can interactively select a sub-set of the set of data and the visualization is re-rendered with the ranges of data values re-sized to display the selected sub-set with finer granularity.

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Paul Davies