This blog post is Human-Centered Content: Written by humans for humans.

Although summer is almost over, it is never too late to start to work on your beach body. My friends challenged me to do a sit-up every day for 100 days while increasing the number of sit-ups each day by one, so on the last day, we do 100 sit ups.  

Of course, I thought it would be fascinating to track this progress, and Sigma seemed to be the perfect place to do it.  

Although Sigma lacks some of the most customizable features of other BI platforms like Tableau, it still boasts an impressive suite of visualization options. In this blog, we will highlight how to build a simple line chart, and turn it into an application by improving formatting and leveraging Sigma’s writeback capabilities. Additionally, we will be automating recurring subscriptions to the data.  

That said, let’s break this into three distinct parts: we’ll start with something good, get a little better and finally find out how to make this the best viz we can.

Good

Step One: Building the Table  

We will start from scratch here with an empty input table: 

(For more information on input tables, check out my previous guide). If you have data in mind, you can of course connect that way. 

Let’s leave the starting text column for now (we can reference important dates here later).  

Next, we are going to add some calculations to fill out our table. Let’s start with the number of Sit-ups to do:  

We create a new column and select calculation. The granularity of our table will be daily sit-ups, and they increase by one each day, so a simple RowNumber() calculation will work to generate our sequence of increasing values. Sigma starts us with three rows, but we will go ahead and click the plus underneath the row number to get us to 100 rows. (You can also just hit enter on the last row to achieve this):

Great! Now that we have the number of sit-ups we need to do each day. All we need to make a chart is the day on which we need to do them.

We will start the day I am writing this blog, but you can start whenever you are ready for the challenge. We will use another calculation column and use a dateadd() function to create a list of 100 dates. (In the function, use the day before the day you want the chart to start):

 And just like that, we are ready to create our basic chart. It only takes two fields, after all.  

Step 2: Line Chart 

Let’s go to the elements pop out on the bottom of the screen in Edit view and select a line chart from charts. Line charts are great for viewing data over time:  

We then choose the input table we created as our data source: 

 Make the X axis the Date field and put “Number of Sit-ups” on the Y axis:

And Bam! We got a line chart, people: 

But this chart offers limited analytical insight. We already knew we would be doing 50 sit-ups on day 50. But how many total sit ups will we have done by day 50? What percentage of the total number of sit ups will we have completed by the end of September? 

Step 3: Adding a Second Line 

 Let’s add some more calculations. Let’s start with a total number of sit-ups in a new calculation column. We will use Sigma’s CumulativeSum() function to track the running total of sit-ups over time. This lets the viewer gauge overall progress rather than just looking at individual daily values. While we are at it, let’s grab the percentage of total sit ups. The Rollup function is our friend here as it allows us to find the max of the entire column instead of just a single row: 

 Now we can add percentage of total completed to the chart:  

Well, that doesn’t look great. There are a couple of potential solutions. Either we could change the number of sit-ups to a percentage, or we could make this a dual axis chart. Let’s try dual axis.  

Select “percentage” in the properties pane and follow the menus to change the axis from left to right:  

By using a dual axis chart, we enable the user to view absolute daily values alongside progress toward our final goal which is crucial for spotting trends and pacing. Now we have a basic line chart that shows the relationship between two different measurements of our progress through the sit-up challenge:  

 This chart is good, but it could be better.  

Better 

Step 4: Formatting 

Now this basic chart is functional, but it still is plain. The titles are too long, and the formatting is inconsistent. Let’s start by cleaning up the titles and legends. It’s best to keep titles simple yet communicative:   

 Cool! Now let’s format the dates and percentages to make them more understandable. We can do this directly in the properties pane:  

Clearly legible formats allow your user to focus on the insights the visualization provides rather than having to decipher the meaning of fields and numbers. Now we have something that looks a little more professional, but there is more we can do. 

Let’s take this to the next level and add a couple of features to bring even more insight into this viz. It would be great to see the total number of sit-ups which were completed on any given day. Let’s add this metric to the tooltip! 

Simply drag the metric into the tooltip pane and give it a reasonable name:  

 We can also add sit-ups remaining by adding another calculation column and then adding it into the tooltip as well.  

 

Now that’s some decent information. Interactive tooltips provide just-in-time details, keeping the chart clean while enabling deeper exploration. 

Now, let’s look at the chart itself. The colors don’t pop as much as I would want, so let’s start by making the lines a little thicker. We go to the format pane and under line style we have a number of formatting options:  

In the formatting pane, we can also add a reference line to help us track how far along the chart we currently are. Under “Reference” marks, we set a line on the x-axis and with a custom formula equal to today:  

Here is what this will look like 10 days into the challenge: 

Let’s add some more personality to this. Personally, I love a dark theme. We can change the workbook settings to dark theme, then customize our chart colors:  

Green and purple are my favorite colors, and they have decent contrast: 

Let’s format the axis and legend text to make them pop from the dark background: 

Now that’s a good-looking chart. Additionally, with the lines made bolder and theme adjusted to a dark background with contrasting colors, the chart the chart pops out making insights more easily accessible. This is definitely better than the good version, but there is still more we can do to make it the best chart we can. 

Best: 

So far, we have leveraged some of Sigma’s visualization formatting options and input tables to make a pretty neat line chart, but we have not yet leveraged Sigma’s coolest features. What if instead of the reference line updating automatically each day, we make it so the user needs to check off that they have completed the sit-ups for the day? By utilizing Sigma’s action sequences and input tables, we can track our progress against our goal.  

Let’s add a text column and name it “Completed?” Then we can type “False,” or whatever you prefer, and double click the fill handle to fill the column with rows saying “False.” Additionally Create an ID column for the table:  

 Next, let’s make a button. Head back to the elements section at the bottom of the screen:

 Let’s call the button “Log Today’s Progress” for now. We are also going to make to hold a value for our action sequence. Name it “Helper-Control” so it is easy to find:  

Next, click on the “+” button on the actions pane. We are going to create an action sequence:

First, we are going to set the Helper control to be the ID of the first row in the table where “Completed?” is “False.” The lookup() function is the way to go here:

Next, we will update the row to be true based on the ID stored in the helper control:  

Now, we can add a reference band to show our actual progress. We will use another look up function to make the end of the band follow our progress. We’ll set the start of the band a constant value set to the first day of the challenge:  

Cool!

Now, let’s use Sigma’s dynamic text feature to customize our button even further. To use dynamic text simply type “=” and then the formula you would like to use in the dynamic text:  

Great! Now for the finishing touches, let’s put our visualization and button in a container so people know they go together:  

We also moved the legend to the top of the line chart and gave the container a dark purple color to help our viz stand out. I bet you can figure those ones out at this point:  

Perfect! This is just what I want to see, but I want to be reminded of this visualization and button every day so I can make sure to do my exercise and advance my progress. While this is a simple way to set up progress tracking, there are a ton of ways to make this even more interactive (keep an eye out for another blog from yours truly). 

We want to see the whole container in the export as a quick view as well as a link to the workbook so we can log our progress. You will have to publish any changes to your workbook before scheduling the export:  

Feel free to customize the message, sending frequency and times as you wish:  

And just like that, we have gone from a concept of a daily sit-up challenge to a mini data app chock full of insights as well as automatic daily reporting in a matter of minute. What began as a simple visualization evolved into an interactive, user-friendly performance tracker which combines static insights with real-time updates and scheduled visibility. Along the way, we explored chart formatting, advanced calculations and Sigma’s innovative action sequences. And best of all… It works! I am currently on day 38 of this challenge and my abs are really starting to hurt. Wish me luck!  

Sigma offers many more formatting options than the ones covered in this blog, so I encourage you to go out and look for more. Sigma is so much fun to work with. And if you ever need any help with your Sigma projects, let us know and see what we can do to help!