Advanced Report Design - Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - page 237

The Anatomy of a Chart
There is typically a lot of detail work involved in chart design and many properties to manage. Fig-
ure 6-74 shows the major property groups for charts. Although some charts have a few unique proper-
ties and some may not support all, generally these are shared across all chart types.
Figure 6-74
After the chart is placed in the report body, fields may be dragged from the Dataset window directly
onto the chart design surface. At minimum, a chart should have one aggregated field for the value and
one grouped field for the category. The category and series groups represent the X- and Y-axis in bar,
column, line, area, and point charts.
Figure 6-75 shows four fields dropped onto this line chart in the designer. The ExtendedAmountSum
field will provide the data point values. Distinct ProductCategory values will group data along the
series. Two fields were dropped onto the chart category area. This creates two related groups on
this axis.
Figure 6-76 shows the same chart configuration on the Data tab of the Chart Properties dialog. The
chart groups created using the previous method may be modified here. Specific properties related to
the category group(s) are accessible from the Grouping and Sorting dialog after you click the Edit
button in this section.