Saying that reports aren’t always eye catchy is a bit of an understatement. Sometimes they’re just dull and dreary pieces of writing, boring data spread across columns and rows. Those who don’t need it, escape to the next page.
But what if you want more than a mere glimpse from a hasty reader? What if you want to propel the ideas behind the data? Emphasize its importance?
Then a table is not enough – you need widgets.
Problem statement
In this post I’ll show a publicly available report and explain how to re-create it with Sharp-Shooter. So here goes our poster child: a NASA plot that reveals a rapid decline in the number of astrophysics missions. The dotted line means “today”, and it’s evident that the plethora of space observatories we’ve been enjoying lately, is pretty much going to stop by 2014:
Why re-creating this very report? First off, it’s interesting data about something that concerns your humble correspondent
Secondly, it’s a challenging task to do in Sharp-Shooter. While building this plot, we’d have to solve several problems, e.g.:
- How to display composite headers and footers?
- How to use bindings in Instrument Designer?
- How to display and position images?
- ..and a few others
Below go step by step instructions on creating the above report in Sharp-Shooter, and you can also go ahead and download the full solution here.
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