Stiltsoft’s Table Filter and Chart’s Add-On
Rapid development of digital technologies has brought colossal data amounts into everyday life of any person. While browsing the Internet, reading newspapers, preparing reports, evaluating analytics data we deal with different data formats that our brain automatically processes, aggregates and saves in the maximally compressed form.
But what can you do with the datasheets containing thousands of rows? First of all, you need to choose a tool that can cope with this. There are a lot of solutions but you will have to spend several days of your time on evaluation of this software and figuring out what to do. Is there any solution that can be intuitively simple, but flexible at a time? Definitely, yes. You can try Atlassian Confluence and Table Filter and Charts add-on from StiltSoft.
Confluence is a perfect team collaboration platform that allows you to efficiently work with data and share results of your with teammates. Table Filter and Charts add-on is the add-on for Confluence that can help you manage table and transform it into the maximally simplified form for further evaluation and analysis.
Table Filter and Charts add-on comes with a set of macros:
- Table Filter – filters table data of different formats with the multiple filter types.
- Pivot Table – creates the pivot table from the source table having repeated values.
- Chart from Table – creates charts and graphs from data series with the flexible way to change data series.
Table Data Filtration with Ease
If you work much with tables, you will name as MS Excel as one of the most famous table processing application. But what if you needn’t all these complicated functions, all you need is to filter the table data.
Table Filter and Charts add-on will help you with this. All you need is just to insert the table or any macro outputting the table into this macro.
The variety of filter types allows you to successfully filter your table data without spending much time on configuration of the add-on. You can choose between the following filters:
- Dropdown filter allows you select the unique values from the column for table filtration.
- Free text and global filters allows you to enter custom queries for filtration of specific columns or the whole table at once.
- Number filter allows you to define number ranges for filtration of numerical values in the table.
- Date filter allows you to work with dates and define the appropriate date ranges for table filtration.
- Icon filter allows you to filter cells containing graphics assets, such as icons, emoticons or images.
You can filter table data while editing or viewing Confluence pages, define the appropriate data formats, set default values for filters, enable automatic row numbering or apply default sorting order to specific columns.
As an example, of add-on usage let’s review the table with taxation data over the year for a list of companies. And let’s try to find how many companies have overdue taxation payments.
So what we can do? We have added several filters, as follows:
- A dropdown filter for selecting the appropriate company type.
- A free text filter for filtering companies by states they are located in. This filter type supports regular expressions, so you can instantly enter several states.
- A date filter for finding overdue payments.
- We have also enabled automatic row numbering to instantly see the number of values matching our criteria and we have hidden the column with entry ID’s.
After filtration we have found 10 entries that we were interested in. So that’s done! You can instantly export this data to Word or PDF or just save the filtration parameters in the macro settings.
Visualizing Table Data with Сharts and Graphs
For better understanding of table data, you can visualize numerous data values with charts and graphs that will be more visually appealing than raw data. Additionally, you can see the trends of your data movements, and see the possible issues in advance.
The Chart from Table macro bundled within Table Filter and Charts add-on allows you transform your data series into charts and graphs with configurable parameters.
All you need is just select the column with labels and the column with numerical values.
A plenty of different charts and a set of options will allow you to visualize your data in the way you want it and adjust their look depending on your actual needs.
Summarizing Data with Pivot Tables
Having a table with some repeated values, you may decide to summarize it and find out the aggregated values over all table data. This procedure will not be a problem if you use Table Filter and Charts for Confluence. It is equipped with the Pivot Table macro that allows you to get pivot tables on the basis of repeated values in your table.
We continue our work with the table containing taxation data and let’s try to find taxation amounts by company types, specialization or by state.
You just need to place the table into the Pivot Table macro, define the column with labels that will be summarized and the column with numerical values for summarization. The result of the add-on work is shown below,
You can select among the available operations to calculate the number of entries, get the average, minimal or maximal values, or just sum all values for each unique entry.
Availability of the panel in the page view mode, allows you quickly switch between different columns containing values for aggregation and summarization.
The selected parameters you can save in the macro body. Additionally, you can export the pivot table to PDF or Word.
Advancing with Table Filter and Charts add-on
For efficient table data processing you can combine three macros into a single tool that will filter data, generate a pivot data on the basis of filtered data and then generate a chart of graph on the basis of the summarized or aggregated values.
So what does this give you? Unlimited flexibility in data transformation operations and instant output of data you really need at the moment.
In a blink of an eye, you can switch from one data series to another one and get the chart illustrating of what’s going.
Now you can no longer be afraid of Confluence. It can be used as a good platform for processing data and and getting insight into the world of numbers.
Management of the macros included in the add-on is pretty simple and you will get used to it after several uses. The convenience and user-friendliness of add-on interface and available capabilities will allow you to cope with tasks much faster, especially if dealing with long spreadsheets or exporting data from some external resources.
You can try Table Filter and Charts add-on in StiltSoft Sandbox and see how it works in real life. Also check out Addteq’s Excellentable add-on for integrating interactive spreadsheets in Confluence.
