Hi,
I have a requirement where a project may have multiple milestones, and for each milestone there is a scheduled finish date and an actual finish date (Any start date is not being provided). There is another numeric field which should act as the base for alerters.
Have been playing with single value components but to no avail. 
Please suggest what would be the best component to represent such data.
Thanks
mehak83 (BOB member since 2011-06-28)
That depends on what your business/user requirements are. What are you trying to achieve/display with this dashboard?
Debbie
Debbie 
(BOB member since 2005-03-01)
Hi Debbie,
Thanks for replying.
The business requirement is to show project-related data (Project Cost, Project Progress and Project Milestone status) in the dashboard. We’re going with 4 quadrants in dashboard, where 2 quadrants are dedicated to cost and one to progress. In the 4th quadrant, we need to show the project milestone status, along with the above mentioned dates. For a single project, there could be 5 to 20 milestones. On selecting a milestone from the drill filter, the data for that particular milestone should be shown, along with its status (Red/Amber/Green).
Hope this clears the requirement.
mehak83 (BOB member since 2011-06-28)
I played around with the Bullet chart and this could be a good component for this requirement, if you are only going to show one benchmark at a time. This is how I set it up:
Performance value = Actual finish date
Comparative Value = Scheduled finish date
Scale values: Scheduled date and actual date (both cells)
The Scale I left as auto scale (since we don’t have a start date)
The colors I set like this:
Performance color will be bound to a cell with a formula that compares the dates - e.g. =if (Actual date < Scheduled date, “#008000”, “#ff0000”)
This will dynamically change the performance bar in the middle to green or red, depending on whether the benchmark finished before or after the scheduled date.
Comparative Marker Color: yellow or some nice contrasting color
Scale High Color: white (since we really don’t want that to show)
Scale Low Color: dark gray
The bullet chart performance bar color will dynamically change as the user selects a benchmark.
Conversely, if there are only 5-20 benchmarks per project, you may also want to consider using the Scorecard component and show all the benchmarks for a particular project with the Actual and Scheduled finish, along with some indicators for red or green.
If you need the XLF for how I set this up, let me know.
Thanks,
~Roxanne P
Sr BI Consultant
InfoSol
RoxanneP 
(BOB member since 2006-08-07)
Hi Roxanne,
Thank you for your reply.
We had initially provided this data in scorecard only (and scorecard it is that is now being finalized). The client (sponsors of the project, not the users) did not want to go with a tabular view of data unless justified.
And yes, we had also tried showing one milestone at a time using bullet chart. And there’s a BUT again… 
First of all, the end-users want to see all of milestones together. Secondly, they want to see the actual dates as well. And when I give the dates values in Performance and Comparative fields and enable the mouse-over, the date values are pre-fixed with “Performance” and “Comparative” prefix, which are unfamiliar terms to our users. Anyhow, we have finally used the score-card itself. Hope, they would find our justifications convincing enough. 
mehak83 (BOB member since 2011-06-28)