SharePoint 2013 (Office 365) - How do I chart a list?

Question

I've fairly new into SharePoint, so excuse any ignorance, but I recently started looking at SharePoint 2013 rather to see what it has on top of SharePoint 2010.

I signed up for a BUILD account so I now have a SharePoint 2013 developer site mydomain.sharepoint.com. I've created an internal list and then I wanted to add a graph to a page. I can't seem to however get this working in SharePoint 2013. With the removal of the Chart web part I'm supposed to be using Excel services.

So I had to create a local Spreadsheet thats bound to my list in the cloud, add a chart then upload that to my sharepoint site. I added a webpart to show the excel contents and I have my chart. The problem is, if I update the list the process to get the chart to update seems to be:

1. Open the Excel file in SharePoint 2013 within my local Excel instance.
2. Refresh the Data Connections
3. Save the spreadsheet back to SharePoint 2013.
4. Refresh the page

This doesn't really feel like a nice solution to bind a chart to a list properly! If I open the Excel spreadsheet using the Excel web app it suggests that the SharePoint list isn't supported in the browser mode. I'm assuming that this is why it neither updates automatically, nor when I open the spreadsheet in office 365.

I'm sure there must be a better way to do this though, does anyone know what it is?

Answer 1

You could try Plumsail Dashboard Designer. It supports SharePoint 2013 as well as SharePoint Online in Office 365. Here is the demo built on Office 365 public site: http://www.spchart.com/

Answer 2

Look at http://www.aasoftech.com/SitePages/How%20to%20create%20a%20Chart%20from%20SharePoint%20List.aspx and also video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM37pNFMCUg .

This tool allows you to create Google chart using client object model. The code is ready to use. You can download the code from the site.

Answer 3

Chart WebPart along with other functionalities have been removed from Excel Services because you now can do that same task from inside Excel Web App itself.

If you're using Office 365 Developer Site, you can Add a new app, and choose "Napa" from the store, once Napa is added to your developer site, you can choose it to create a new project, and choose Content App For Excel, you can use the functionality that you already know in excel to build your charts.

Hope this would help you.

Answer 4

Assuming you have an unattended service account set up for Excel services, you could do the following. Extensive details and pictures located at this fantastic blog post, including how to set up the service account.

From the Excel document:

1. In the ribbon at the top, click on the “Data” tab
2. In the “Connections” group of the data tab, click the “Connections” button
3. Highlight the connection in your workbook, and then click the “Properties” button
4. Click on the “Definition” tab of the resulting Connection properties window
5. Click on the “Authentication Settings” button at the bottom of the window
6. Select option 2 - “Use a stored account” and select your unattended service account

Answer 5

We have been trying to chart a list in Sharepoint 365 online and the whole excel services caused some pain. One of our developers used chart.js and an app to render some live charts from a list.

http://www.simego.com/Blog/2013/09/Charts-and-Office-365-SharePoint-Online