Text area
A text area is a space where you can add information such as the purpose of a page, or maybe state the observations you have made, so that other people can verify or comment on your findings. You can also add images, links, and buttons, which can initiate actions that you think might be helpful for others who open your analysis.
The text area is not a visualization as such, but it can be placed within a page just like a bar chart or scatter plot. For more information on how to position the text area in a page, see Arranging visualizations.
See also Locking the size of certain visualizations to learn how to avoid scroll bars in text areas, when creating analyses that will be viewed on screens of different sizes.
There are several different types of content you can add to a text area:
- Text - text can be formatted to your liking, by changing the font, color, alignment, and so on. You can also add links leading to an external web page.
- Images - images can be added to the text area in GIF, BMP, PNG or JPG format. Regular images are added using Insert Image, but you can also add images that behave like action controls when clicking on them, see below.
- Web links - this could be either an ordinary web address, a mailto link opening an empty email for a specified person or a link to a related analysis. If your company needs to link to something else, an administrator has the possibility to modify the preferences Allow Additional Uri Schemes and Additional Uri Schemes in the Administration Manager.
- Action controls - you can add links, buttons or images that perform a certain action, or series of actions, to the text area. For example, an action link can switch to a different page or apply a bookmark. It can also refresh a data function calculation or run a script. This can be handy if you intend to share your analysis with other people. You can, for example, write instructions in a text area, and include links to any operations you want them to perform, such as: "...and when you are done filtering, refresh the calculation.". In addition, if any reports of the analysis have been prepared, they can be exported to a PDF document using an action control.
- Property controls - you can add a number of different items that control the values of selected properties. It could be drop-down lists, list boxes or sliders with predefined values. You can also add manual input fields where anything can be entered, or you could simply add a label showing the current value of a specified property. See Adding a property control to a text area for more information.
- Filters - if you only want to show a few filters in your analysis, you can add those filters to a text area. This means the filters panel and the data in analysis flyout are not needed for filtering purposes and can be closed to save screen estate. Filters in the text area can also be configured to use a different filtering scheme than the one used on the rest of the page. This could be useful if you have selected to limit one or more visualizations on a page by some other filtering scheme than the one used on the page.
- Dynamic items - dynamic items are small "visualizations" that can live within a text area or in a graphical table. When included in a text area they represent an aggregated view of some data. For example, this could be a calculated value showing the total sum of sales. The dynamic items can be configured to respond to the page filtering, some other filtering or no filtering. They can also be limited by markings in other visualizations, similar to details visualizations. The available dynamic items are sparklines, calculated values, icons and bullet graphs. See Adding a dynamic item to a text area for more information.
Include configuration in bookmark
In the visualization properties for a text area, you can select to Include configuration in bookmark. This setting specifies whether the current configuration of this particular text area should be included when capturing bookmarks. For example, if you are currently creating a guided analysis for other people and you are adding bookmarks to be used as action links in the text area, you probably do not want to capture the current content in your text area while this is under construction. If that is the case, this check box should be cleared.
On the other hand, if you want to create an action link which actually alters the information in the text area, then the check box should be selected when capturing the bookmark.
