Combining and Updating Charts in Version 3.3

Combining and Updating Reports - Version 3.3 (PDF)

Version 3.3 of the BizInt Smart Charts products has introduced a new interface for combining charts, building on the changes that were introduced in version 3.0. This page describes how to combine charts into new charts to accomplish a variety of tasks.

The descriptions contained in this document apply to version 3.3.0 (and later) of BizInt Smart Charts for Drug Pipelines and BizInt Smart Charts for Patents.

Why combine charts?

There are two basic reasons why you would want to combine charts:

• combine - to bring sets of records from different searches into a single report
• update - to bring similar sets of records together into an up-to-date report, highlighting what has changed over time

In many cases, you may find that you are performing an operation which is a mix of these two behaviors.

In earlier versions, both goals were achieved with the Combine command. In version 3.3, there are now two separate commands on the File menu (Combine and Update) to accomplish these tasks. The basic decisions you make during this process are the same, regardless of which command you use.

Step 1 - The Key Chart

The first decision you must make is to decide which chart is the "Key Chart" (when updating, we refer to this as the "Older" chart). The Key Chart contributes to the Combined chart in several ways:

• the columns (order, titles, size, and other properties) are copied from the Key Chart
• the title of the new chart is taken from the Key Chart by default (although you now have the option to change this)
• Page Setup and other similar options are ocpied from the Key Chart
• "Row Status" identifies changes relative to the Key Chart (as described below)

In general, if you have an existing report that has already been formatted for presentation, that should be your Key Chart.

If you are Updating, your old chart will be the Key Chart. You will notice that we use the name "Older" for the Key Chart if you choose the Update command, in order to remind you of this.

Step 2 - Additional Charts

Once you have selected your Key Chart, you need to choose the charts containing additional records which should be added to the Key Chart. We suggest that you select no more than six additional charts at one time. If you want to add more data, it is best to do it in several iterations.

BizInt Smart Charts creates the new chart by adding the rows from each additional chart to the Key Chart one at a time. So if there were no duplicate rows among the charts, the new chart would contain all of the rows from the Key Chart, followed by all of the rows from the first additional cahrt, then those from the second, and so on.

However if there are duplicate rows BizInt Smart Charts will only place one copy in the new chart. How does BizInt Smart Charts choose? If there is an update date available for the rows, then the most current row will be selected. If rows have the same update date, then the first copy of the row encountered in the list (i.e. from the Key Chart, first additional row, second additional row...) will be selected.

What happens to duplicate rows?

BizInt Smart Charts considers two rows to be duplicates if they come from the same database and have the same accession number. Records from different databases referring to the same subject are not considered duplicates.

If you combine two charts which contain duplicate rows, only one copy of the row will appear in the new chart. As mentioned above, the first rule used to select which row will appear is to check the update date of the rows, and select the more recent row. If the update dates are the same, the row is taken from the first chart in which it appears (from the Key Chart and the Additional Charts).

Note that the duplicate rows may both appear in the Additional Charts. In this case, the rows are considered in the order they are encountered.

When a duplicate row is replaced, the columns derived from the publisher data are overwritten with the values in the selected row. Values in columns that are user-added (via the Edit menu's Add Column command) are preserved from the earlier chart.

Options available in Step 3 (below) can override this behavior. The first two options can be though of as "fill in the blanks":

• Fill empty cells with images from duplicate rows - if the Key Chart has an empty cell, and one of the duplicate rows has an image in that column, the image will be placed in the resulting cell.
• Fill empty cells with text from duplicate rows - if the Key Chart has an empty cell, and one of the duplicate rows has text in that column, the text will be placed in the resulting cell.

The special image associated with some rows called the Publisher Image can be filled in from a duplicate row, much as empty cells are in the two options above:

• Load 'publisher image' from duplicate rows - selects the first Publisher Image from among the duplicate rows as associates it with the row. This option is useful if you forget to display images for a set of results and later want to add the images.

Values in user-added columns are treated somewhat differently when duplicate rows are encountered:

• Append differing values in user cells (using /Also:/) - this option will cause all different values in a column from duplicate rows to be collected, and listed one after the other in the combined chart.

Explaining Row Status

Before explaining the options that are available, it is helpful to understand what the Row Status means in BizInt Smart Charts.

Row Status is an explanation of how each row came to be in the Combined chart:

• Unchanged - The row came from the Key Chart without being modified
• Updated - The row was present in the Key Chart, but was replaced by a more recent version from the Additional Charts.
• Added - The row was not present in the Key Chart, and was added from one of the Additional Charts.
• User Data Changed - The row came from the Key Chart with no changes aside from data in user-added columns
• Not in Added Results - This is a special value for Row Status which is only used when the Flag rows in key chart that are not in updates option is enabled. This indicates that the row was present in the Key Chart, but not in any of the Additional Charts.

Step 3 - Controlling the Combine or Update Operation

Up to this point, you have only selected the charts to combine. In earlier versions of the software, that was all you could do. In Version 3.3, you have detailed control over many aspects of the Combine or Update process.

The first option on the screen is the title for the chart to be created. The default title is that of the Key Chart, but you can change this if desired.

The second option is a choice of several operations that you may be performing with the Update or Combine command. These are simply presets for the options that follow on the screen. If you override any of the options, the preset will change to "Custom", but don't worry as the software will still do as you ask.

The specific options in Version 3.3 are described below:

• Keep Row Status from key chart - this keeps the Row Status values in the Key Chart from being reset to Unchanged, which is often helpful if you are adding to a chart in stages.
• Keep Row Status from all original charts - if this option is set, the Row Status will be transferred from from all original rows, unless the row is Updated or User Data Added. You will never see a row marked Added when this is set, unless the row was marked Added in the original chart.
• Flag rows in key chart that are not in updates - if you run exactly the same search strategy and combine the results, this option will indicate which rows in the older chart are no longer in the search results with the Not In Added Results value.
• Turn on Color Code Changed Cells - when updating, this is a short cut to turn on the View option to color code the cells that have changed.
• Detect updates when update date missing - as described above, BizInt smart Charts looks at the update date to determine whether a row has changed. However some databases do not provide update dates. This option instructs the software to assume that the key chart is older, and that the charts in the list of additional charts are in order from oldest to newest. Duplicate rows from older charts will be compared with those from the newer charts on a cell-by-cell basis to determine the Row Status.
• Make Row Status column visible in new chart - the Row Status column is always created in Combined and Updated charts, if it doesn't already exist. This option makes the column visible initially in the resulting chart. You can always hide the column later by the View | Columns panel, or by applying a chart template.

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