Legend

The legend provides information that helps the viewer identify what is represented in a visualization. You can decide whether or not the legend should be visible.

About this task

An example of a legend is shown below:

Show the legend when the information within it is necessary for interpreting the visualization. Hide the legend when you must use as much as possible of the screen estate for the visualizations themselves.

Tip: You can decide what information to include, and the position of the legend within the visualization.

Procedure

Place the cursor on the visualization.
Icons are shown in the upper right corner of the visualization.
Click to toggle between showing and hiding the legend.

Tip: You can also show or hide the legend from the visualization properties.

Results

Which information is available in the legend by default varies with the visualization type. For example, the legend of a pie chart will show which column determines the size of the pie sectors, and the legend of a scatter plot will show if a column has been used to define the marker size or marker shape, and so on. You can edit all such properties by clicking the respective column selectors in the legend.

When multiple data tables are available in the analysis, the legend for all new visualizations will automatically show a data table selector where you can switch data table.

You can also change the colors used in the visualization directly from the legend. Click the color circle in the legend to open a color palette where you can select another color. Clicking a shape icon under Shape by similarly allows you to switch shape.

Note that the column selector Marker by in a scatter plot can affect how other column selectors in the visualization can be configured. If you choose to let markers represent the contents of a column, rather than using the row number, and the data in this column is possible to aggregate, the Aggregation menu will be activated in the appropriate column selectors. Spotfire will also try to set the axis selectors to the most meaningful aggregation. See Aggregating data for more information.

Select Remove from a column selector to remove any selections made. For example, removing all columns from the Size by option in a scatter plot and setting it to (None) will make all markers be of the same size instead of letting the size depend on a certain column.

The Data table selector allows you to specify the main data table to be used in the visualization. See Multiple data tables in one visualization for more information about the main data table. The Marking selector specifies which marking (if any) to use in the visualization.