m-Power Gets All Gussied Up with New Charts, Graphs

March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie

A great tennis player from Las Vegas once proclaimed, “Image is everything.” While hardcore IBM i types weaned on sparsely colored 5250 screens may disagree, the folks at mrc have embraced good looks as a strategic advantage. Recently, the Chicago company outfitted its IBM i Web app dev tool, m-Power, with an array of new charts and graphs that it plainly admits are “beautiful.”

Topping the best-dressed list in m-Power’s graphs and chart lineups are several new chart types, including interactive funnel charts, cylinder charts, and “zoom line” charts. The charts are included with a subscription to m-Power, and are particularly useful for displaying key performance indicators (KPIs) as part of Web-based business intelligence (BI) dashboards.

m-Power lets users combine two or more chart types into a single chart, such as this consolidated line and bar chart.

The new zoom-line charts appear as simple line charts at first. But instead of just displaying information, they let users interact with it by allowing them to drill down, or “zoom,” into the underlying data.

“These new charts and graphs really improve m-Power’s reporting power,” mrc’s manager of software development Tyler Wassell says in a press release. “Not only can users create a wider array of beautiful charts and graphs, they also have even more customization options than ever before.”

Interactive funnel charts are useful for tracking website conversion rates, sales cycles, and other data.

Charts and graphs have always been a part of m-Power, which combines a drag-and-drop development environment with a series of predefined application templates and Java code generators.

With the latest refresh, the product now sports more than 90 predefined chart types, including: spline line and step line charts; 3D donut and cylinder charts; dial and temperature charts; waterfall and spider charts; and Pareto 80/20 and Marimekko charts. You can see some of the charts in action at www.mrc-productivity.com/Products/charts.html.