In response to overwhelming customer demand, Spotfire 3.1 includes a new visualization for showing bars and lines at the same time.  Like other Spotfire visualizations it is highly configurable and interactive, it works seamlessly with the other visuals for drilling and showing relationships, and best of all it makes comparing trends easier for common cases like comparing actual figures to forecasts or quotas, or simply keeping track of a key reference while browsing other related trends.

Here are some other key features for this versatile plot …

Just click on the icons in the Legend when using Spotfire Professional and you can quickly change which trends are lines and which are bars …

You can choose to stack multiple sets of bars and put the side-by-side

Sort by one of the trends to see how well the others are following … in this case the x-axis is sorted by the bars representing the Health Care sector.

And finally, multi-y scaling means that trends can easily be compared from vastly different scales.  Notice how each trellis panel has its own scale.  Individual trends can also have their own scaling within the same frame.