Has anyone made a stagger chart with some time-based data?

1

Hey hey :wave::wave:

Wondering if any power users have played with making stagger charts in CODA. @Paul_Danyliuk @maria

Stagger charts are super useful for seeing the health of a business, and with all the resource/task/product management things I’ve seen on coda… its very likely someone has built this with elegance.

My use case: Wanting to build a way for contractors to…

  • (on a weekly basis) predict how many hours they will be able to work for this week, next week, and the following week.
  • (on a daily basis) report how many hours they worked today

With these two sets of numbers, we’ll be able to see how many actual hours are worked vs predicted. Useful, but I’d like to go further. Once we get the contractors’ hours ("supply hours available") stagger chart functioning with some utility, we would extend this by comparing available supply hours with predicted demand hours.

To predict demand hours:

  • have a table of all the things we pay people to do (w/ cost, time, effort, etc.)
  • have another table of all the orders people have made, and the things in each order (w/ stats of all the things per order, including how much time the order will take to fill - aka "demand hours needed")

The goal is to end up with a couple of Views to visualize "demand hours needed" and "supply hours available" over time:

  • one view that looks like a stagger chart
  • the other view that plots supply and demand hours over time

Thanks so much everyone :pray::heart:

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What’s a staggered chart? Something like this, a crosstab table showing cohort dynamics?

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This is a stagger chart. You can “see” different kinds of business activity from reading this chart across rows or down columns. Good for context.

IMG_5211 copy
IMG_5211 copy2291Ă—1794 1.16 MB

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Got it. So yeah, basically “cohorts” (show a different dynamics for a group of people joined in August, for a group of people joined in September etc).

Yes, what you have to do is build a table where each row describes and calculates each cell of this staggered chart. You’ll have a column saying which row of the chart it is and a separate column saying which column of the chart it is. Then you can output it as a table grouped in the top and on the left. My sample doc above has it (no calculations there though, but not too hard to add)

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I see what you did there. Will attempt and report back.

Thanks!

6

Here’s a sample for you.

This chart takes the initial number and multiplies it by 1.5 for each next period (you can find the logic in DB Periods). Initial numbers are taken from DB Actual numbers table

Note that this is a very heavy calculation overall (being dependent on other rows in the same table). If you need a few years worth of data by month that’s fine. But if you need to track data daily (let’s say anything more than a 30x30 table) that could become a problem. Coda doesn’t know that you’re trying to calculate sequential data — it tries to calculate lots of it in parallel. Then see that some dependent numbers have changed and calculate again. And again and again, for god knows how many digest cycles until it settles in equilibrium.

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