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Horizon Analytics - Report Builder - Handling NULL Visualizations

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rachelhibbardtmo

NULLs show up on line graphs and area charts as value 0. This can be confusing to end users. It would be great to instead of showing 0 for NULL values to not display a data point for NULLs.

 

Current NULL handling drops lines to 0
Proposing something more like this

 

5 replies

rakesh
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  • 835 replies
  • July 21, 2021

Hi @rachelhibbardtmo 

Thanks for posting this.

Typically when there is an aggregation on a value, null’s aggregate to 0. For example Sum (ARR) for onboarded enterprise customers today will be 0 if there are no onboarded enterprise customers today. Which is why charts show that data point. Can you showcase some examples where hiding nulls will be beneficial?

 


rachelhibbardtmo
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  • 45 replies
  • July 22, 2021

@rakesh In the example I posted, NULL indicates a value is not populated yet and should not be assumed to mean 0. We have other examples of line graphs which plot out the full 2021 year forecast v. actual data - since the future months have not occurred their actual volume will be NULL (not 0).

Dropping a NULL to 0 on the graph looks like something drastic has happened.

A NULL could be defaulted to 0 in other places in Gainsight like the Rules Engine, so it would be nice to not default to 0 automatically for other use cases.


cmultanen
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  • 268 replies
  • November 23, 2021

+1, it would be helpful if there was the ability to remove null values from being displayed 

 

For example, in the chart below, X axis represents weeks out from a specific date and Y axis is a % value. Ideally the Q4 line wouldn’t drop to 0 after week 8, it would just not show anything for the weeks with null values.

 


cmultanen
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  • 268 replies
  • October 26, 2022

Curious if there has been any additional thought given to this. Charts ideally shouldn’t plot null values as 0. 


bradley
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  • Expert ⭐️
  • 1129 replies
  • September 12, 2023

I would love an update on this. We have charts that have data plotted over time and the nulls show up as Zeros. When a user clicks on one to drill down, they will see a ‘null’ and not a zero. Their correct interpretation of this is that the chart is wrong.

 

I tried using the new “show missing data points” toggle and all it did was turn my chart from this:

 

to this:

 

so that can’t possibly be the solution here.


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