Working with partial data

All the examples in this page will use the following data:

And our chart will look something like this:

At times you may have incomplete data. There will be two things you can do with it:

1. Connect the missing data.

On a line-type based chart, which is to say this does not work with bar charts or other non-continuous chart types.

You can connect the missing value from the initial example by navigating to Advanced > Plot Options > Line and checking Connect nulls to get the following

2. Exclude the missing data.

It is advisable to familiarize yourself with the different axis types for this.

Starting with our initial example, observe that we first and foremost only include data for whole numbers, but everviz is writing out every reasonable number in our data range. This may happen with datetime and linear axes. The data points are interpreted as being part of a continuum, and any missing data will be filled.

This may not be what you want and if you are looking for this instead:

Change the Horizontal Axis to Category in Basic Editor > Axes.

This is often a problem when you have some bar charts for a set of years, but maybe a few years are missing from the data. The following chart has the same data as the last, but the timestamps are 2017, 2018, missing, missing, 2021, 2022:

This is what the same chart looks like with a Category axis:

Notice in the former example, the data was stretched out to infer the missing values, but here we go straight from 2018 to 2022. The reason for this different behavior, is because Category axes are treated as discrete elements, not part of a continuum. Also notice how the formatting changed as well to be exactly how I had input my timestamp in contrast to just the year above, which I had made so by formatting a Datetime axis as {value:%Y}.

Apologies for the technical wording. If you're not quite sure what a continuum is, think of this: If I say Monday and Wednesday, you know there was a Tuesday in-between. Choosing Category, makes everviz forget all about this intuition, and think of them as mere words, rather than dates.