Creating Data Access Pages with Charts using Office Web Components (Page 1 of 5 )
Creating data access pages which display charts of various types is quite easy. The pages are interactive for licensed users. This article shows you how to create data access pages with three different types of charts.
About Microsoft Office Web Components
OWC are a set of Microsoft COM Controls for spreadsheet, chart and database publishing. These components have their own set of object models: ChartSpace, Data Source Control, PivotTable List, and Spreadsheet. Depending on the version of Office, you may have two different executables for this program. With a licensed version of Office XP your machine may have OWC10.exe. On the other hand with Office 2003 you may have a slightly larger file (22.56MB), OWC11.exe. The version on the Windows XP (Media Center Edition) machine used in this tutorial is OWC11.exe and the tutorial uses MS Access 2003.
If you have no license for Office XP or Office 2003 you can view web pages which use these controls by downloading the executable but you cannot interact with the controls (view only mode). These components can also be added to your ASP.NET applications by referencing them in the Add References' window of COM libraries as shown. For more detailed information on licensing, please search MSDN.
About this tutorial
This is a very basic tutorial targeted to readers who want to use these controls to create charts that can be placed in their data access pages. The tutorial shows how one can create this chart starting from scratch after instantiating an empty data access page in their database. To keep the details simple a couple of tables have been created in an MS Access database called Charts.mdb. The following three tables were created to illustrate the use of the OWC chart control.
The PrincetonTemp tables lists monthly temperatures and the record high temperatures for a New Jersey town (record high is fictitious).
The table Speedy shows time vs. distance covered by a projectile.
Portfolio is a listing of a stock held by a person. It also lists each stock as a percentage of the total.
Next: Monthly temperature chart for Princeton >>
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