Reworked Empty Chart State to replace "Unable to display chart" in Dashboards

Kyle Chipman

I would like to see a rework of the "Unable to display chart" prompt in the Charts widget.

I am building a series of dashboards using Grouped and Summarized reports as the source data for charts, pulling basic counts across multiple sheets. These reports are counting open and overdue tasks, the goal being that they'll be empty more often than populated as team members close out task statuses.

Unfortunately, when reports that power graphs are empty, the graph widget defaults to a visually intense warning more akin to an error than an expected empty state (red-ish hue, warning!symbol, "ask an Admin..." prompt). See screenshot below for reference.

I understand that a workaround is to create a dummy row to populate the report with some kind of data, so it's showing 0 rather than a null value. I've gone that route in this circumstance, but the "Unable to chart data" experience has cropped up a number of other times building out dashboards, and I can't always anticipate or build out dummy rows to accommodate.

For anyone curious, going the dummy-row-for-a-0-count route looks like the example below:

I'm not looking for a significant functionality shift (reworking the ways counts are handled). I'm requesting a less intense visual prompt when there's no data to display. Or, even better, a custom user-defined prompt, so that org-appropriate language can be used to describe what's happening.

我看了看其他地方的社区,但只能findaskedandansweredquestions, not a wishlist submission, though someone in those posts flagged this "Results are empty" visual in an existing template. This visual is in the spirit of the request - a neutral visual statement as opposed to misplaced Error-centric visual dominance. Not sure if I'm overlooking some simple method of implementing this visual in place of "Unable to display chart data".

Thanks!

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Quick update - one more frustrating wrinkle to this dummy-row-for-a-0-count strategy I forgot about; theBlankcounts will still appear alongside your other defined groups, leaving an ugly empty lane in the chart. This further emphasizes a need to rework this empty source data challenge with charts.

Kyle Chipman

It might be lame to reply to one's own post, but a brief update:

The "Results are empty" screenshot above appears specifically for reports with no matching returns. Found it in another dashboard I'm building out, forgot it was specific to reports.