A great Coda feature is displaying a table as a chart. However, you rarely want to display every single row in the chart, as that would be very noisy. Currently, the advice is to add a filter. However, that skews the data, especially for pie charts. Depending on what is filtered out, the percentages of the pie shown are not true for the entire dataset.
This is a solved problem: charts usually lump everything that is not displayed into an “Other” category. However, this would require a different feature for filtering than just using the filter primitive. That may be a good thing, since charts (and tables in general) already need a feature to limit number of rows displayed without having to duplicate all view parameters in a filter, a pain point that comes up repeatedly:
- How to only show top 10 best clients? - #7 by Hector_Reyes
- Display only the Top 100 rows
- Using Slice to limit the rows in a view (return Top n rows)
- Top 10 list from table - #2 by Peter_Brownell
- Show only the 3 most recently added rows that match a certain value - #5 by mallika
- Show up to X number of rows? - #2 by Federico_Stefanato
- Im an idiot.. how can i just how 10 results in a filtered view? - #6 by Paul_Danyliuk
- Counting number of responses and showing top 5
So by introducing a separate feature for number of rows displayed could feed two birds with one scone.
Another way to do it would be to allow users to enter a formula for the Category displayed instead of a table column. This also feeds two birds with one scone, as it allows customizing chart labels on a case by case basis (it is not always pragmatic to have a separate column for every chart) and would make this possible too, as users can tweak when the formula returns “Other” as the category title.