SharePoint 2010 Chart Web Part

To get started, first you need an Enterprise version of SharePoint 2010.  Assuming, you do have an Enterprise key, you then need to activate the SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection Features.

This adds the chart web part (among other things). Then edit any page and add a Chart Web Part. You can find it under Miscellaneous


When you add it to the page, it uses some dummy data and displays a simple bar chart.


At this point, you might be asking yourself “What kind of data can I bind this to?”. By clicking Data & Appearance, you will see the following screen which leads you to links to customize the appearance or bind to data.


We’ll start by going to Connect Chat To Data. Look at these great options we have to choose from.


We can connect to another web part, a list, an external content type (looks like they need to update the BDC wording they have there), and to Excel Services.

What I did is I created a new custom list to contain Sales information. I used an External Data field to allow the user to pick a product from the external content type and enter in some sales data in a field.


This is the list we are going to use on our chart. On the next step of the wizard, we are allowed to pick a list. Note that it also allows you to choose other sites in the collection as well.


The next step allows you to filter your data first if you are so inclined.


The Chart Web Part has a ton of configurable options. On this last step is where you will start seeing some of them. The main thing to set here is your X and Y fields. You can also specify something to group by as well.


Once you finish this last step, you’ll get something that looks like this.


So, what we have here is a chart bound to data coming from a database (via external content type) and a SharePoint list. Pretty cool, right? I think so. It gets better though. What if your boss doesn’t like bar charts? No problem. There are tons of chart types to choose from. Just click on Data & Appearance again and then Customize Your Chart. Look at all of these built in chart types you have.



On the next step, you can further customize the chart you choose. It has some nice pre-built color themes and you can customize the size and what not. It also gives you a live preview as you change settings.



Here is what my new chart looks like.