Perspector Newsletter

Perspector 4.1 Professional Edition can create great looking 3D pie charts, bar charts and column charts:

The built-in chart styles can be seen here.

Installed with Perspector is a guide to charts. It shows how to insert and edit charts. You can find it in the Programs menu, under Perspector. This video also illustrates this.

Charts can be modified using the full editing capability of Perspector. This flexibility gives you a lot of control over how charts look. For example, you could pull a chart apart, or show a picture around a bar or on a slice.

You can also alter the appearance of charts by using the Chart Properties box that is shown when you edit a chart:

Pie chart properties

There are properties to control the position, size and angle of pie charts. Slice Gap controls the distance between the slices, so use this to create an "exploded" pie chart:

The Show property in the Legend property group can be used to show or hide the chart legend. There are also properties that specify which labels are shown on the slices, and where they appear.

Pie charts typically "start" at the top, and work their way around clockwise, like a clock face. However, this can be changed using the Initial Angle and Clockwise properties of the Rotation property group.

Column and bar chart properties

The Chart Type property can be used to change a column chart to a bar chart and vice-versa. This property can also be used to switch to clustered bar and column charts:

The chart at the start of this newsletter uses Cylinder shapes for each column - this is the Shape Type. There is a choice of 10 different shape types that can be used. This chart uses Wedge shapes:

New charts automatically show the whole range of data values from lowest to highest, with a baseline at 0, like this:

However, for some charts it is desirable to show a different range. This can be achieved by modifying the Lower Value and Upper Value properties:

The View and Sizes property groups control the position and size of a chart within the Perspector image. Category Gap and Series Gap control how far apart the bars/columns are from each other.

Gridlines can be added to charts, and modified, using the properties in the Gridlines property group.