Hello. My name is Lisa Grossman, and I am a tester here at JMP. In this poster, I wanted to share my top four easy Graph Builder tips. Since Graph Builder is such a feature-rich platform, I hope that these easy tips may prove helpful to everyone in their data exploration.

For my showcase today, I will be using open data collected by JMP's hometown, the Town of Cary. The Town of Cary has strived to connect their community through data by, collecting metrics on a number of local operations such as recreational activities, trash and recycling, residential and commercial developments, and so much more. But for my demos today, we are just going to review data that Cary has collected on their electric vehicle charging stations, food waste and estimated compost collection, and also census data that's been taken from 2017 to 2020.

Let's go ahead and get started on the first tip, which is Configure Levels. Configure Levels is a great feature in Graph Builder that allows us to combine categories and make columns and column name adjustments without having to re-code the column or affect other uses of the column.

We will first be looking at Cary's data regarding electric vehicle charging stations. Now I just want to say there are many vehicle charging stations across town. But this data table is going to focus on the public charging stations which are free to use. I made a tree map to show the popularity of the charging stations. Of the charging stations shown here, there are two with very similar addresses, and I believe that they might be right next to each other, so I wanted to go ahead and combine the two. I'm going to go and demo this for you here.

If I pull up the table and run this, you can see that there are two categories, 119 East Park Street and 117 East Park Street. If I right-click on the graph below drop zone containing the categorical variable, I can see that the Configure Levels will show up in the menu. If I click that, it'll bring up a dialog for me to see. I can just easily select both of the East Park streets and click Combine. It'll pop up in the list over here. I can change the label, so what I want to call these two combine levels. I'm just going to name them East Park Street and click Okay. Now you can see that the tree map has updated. It has indeed combined both 117 and 119 East Park Street into this tile here.

I just wanted to note that a transform column is created when updates are committed in the Configure Levels dialog. The naming convention of these transform columns is denoted by a single apostrophe after your column name here. Going back to my slides here, I have recorded GIFs of the exact steps I take for each of these tips I show today, but I will also be demoing them live as well. But feel free to review them another time.

Moving on to the second Graph Builder tip, which is making a grid of graphs through the Page Role. I'm going to go straight into my demo here. We're still going to look at the electric vehicle charging stations data. What I was curious to see was what hours during the day did people tend to come charge their vehicles and how that compared among all of the charging locations. I used address as a page role here. If we scroll, we can see the distributions per location.

But I would like to see all of these graphs side by side and maybe not have to scroll to view all of them. We have that ability now. If I right-click in the Page Role, I see the menu item Levels per Row. If I click on that, it'll bring up a little dialog to submit a number of columns for wrap layout. This will just specify my intended wrap layout for how I want my graphs to be laid out. You'll see it when I click Okay. There, I have my wrap layout with two graphs side by side. I don't have to scroll anymore. All graphs are on the same window here.

I have a little bonus feature. If we wanted to link the axis among the graphs and not have repeated axes for the graphs on the right, we can easily do that by going to the little red triangle menu here, and first uncheck Replicate Linked Page Axes, and then go back to the little red triangle menu, and under Link Page Axes, we can link either the X or Y axis. But for this example, I'm going to do Y only. If I click that and Done, now we have a grid of graphs with linked axes. We can see that the graphs on the right do not repeat their axes. That is one of the tips that have been my favorite as of late.

Moving on to my third tip, which is Date and Time Binning and Wrapping. These are great tools in Graph Builder to handle your date data. Date binning allows you to summarize by a date period, whereas date wrapping shows cyclic trends for your date data.

We're going to switch gears a little bit. We're going to look at Cary's food collection program, and I'm going to show an example of date binning with that. Just a little background on the food collection program. It began in 2022. Relatively new. There are currently two public stations that residents can go and drop off their food waste, and attendance at the drop-off centers will then enter in the amount of food waste collected, measured in pounds, at various times during the month.

I'm going to show you my demo here. If I open up the food graph here. I made a bar chart to see how much food waste was collected by the reported date. I want to see how it looks per month. But like I said, since there are multiple entries per month, some months collected more than others, it's really hard to for us to distinguish by months here. But I can right-click on my date axis and I will see both options for Date/Time Binning and Wrapping.

I want to bin by month. If I click this I can now see that I will get a summarized bar by each month. Now it's very clear that each bar represents a month since the program first started. With that, I'm going to close some windows here.

Moving on to our last but not least, tip number four is called Axis Edit Mode. With Axis Edit mode, we can easily set value order and value labels properties within Graph Builder without first doing so from the data table. I'm going to be using the census data that Cary has collected to show you this example.

Opening up the census data, I made a bar chart, so we can see the age group ranges in Cary collected over the course of these 4 years. Without making any changes yet to my data table, and I made this bar graph, we can see that suspiciously the under-five-year-olds are out of order, and they really should be down here.

I can easily make this change in Graph Builder by hold-clicking the axis. Then you can see a grid-like outline appears around all of the categories. This tells us that we are now active in the Edit Axis mode. Now I can drag under-five-year-olds, this group all the way down and see that that is updated. Now, that is in the correct order that I would like it to be. I can also edit this label and maybe change it to this, and see how that has been updated in the table. If I click Escape… You must click the Escape key in order to exit Edit Mode. Now those changes have committed.

I wanted to have the data table open at the same time here. You can see that in the Age Range column, if I open that up, you can now see that Value Order and Value Label properties have been added. These are the changes I just committed in Graph Builder. You can see how easy it is to set those properties while you're in Graph Builder, so it doesn't disrupt your flow while you're exploring.

These are all the tips that I have today, but I hope that they will be meaningful for everyone's exploration as you spend time in Graph Builder. Again, these are some of my favorite ones that have either saved me time or just improved my reports. Thanks for tuning in.