Art of Adoption

Something new popped up in SharePoint, the Chart Webpart. Time to dive into these unCHARTed webparts! Let’s find out what it it, what it can do, how it works (or is supposed to work) and how you might benefit from it by using it on your SharePoint.

First of, I started out with a nice, fresh and ready Section, smacked that little + button to add a new webpart and…it was right there in the top section, all with a that cute little “new” marker that instantly triggers investigation mode. So let’s click on that one and…Boom! A large section appears.

And this is rather interesting on this first encounter. I have this webpart referencing me to a “chat pane”…but there’s no chat pane in the webpart itself. Looking further on the right, expecting it in my web part’s toolbox…it is not there either. There is a hyperlink to microsoft.learn, so…willing to learn more, I click on that. *reading noises* hmm yeah all good and well, but the mentioned examples don’t pop up, my Copilot icon looks different than the example used (for me it is the Copilot logo, not the “Sparkles”) and Learn states under option 2 part 4 I have to “write a prompt in the prompt box”… Right the prompt box, the prompt box for me… that is not there…?

So I then just did what anyone would do in a similar situation…Clicking around until you find out! Added a logging off and on to that mix and then my good old Copilot icon in the top right was back, so on good luck, I clicked that cause I know that one at least opens some type of chat pane.
Of course, the ever helpful Copilot suggested some great thing, but I just wanted to have pie…charts. Note here, I am not that familiar with generating charts, so yes I thought it a great idea to actually ask Copilot in the M365 chat to help me write a good prompt to create a chart in SharePoint using the Chart webpart.

Eagerly I entered the prompt and witnessed the busy buzzing of…Not sure what, cause with great confidence Copilot stated it had created a chart, but my webpart was emptier then before.

And now I am flabbergasted…cause I am really trying to find a way for this to work. To translate its mysterious workings to users, to the world but…

For now I am afraid I am gonna leave this as “uncharted” territory.

“Who is brave enough to challenge these waters with me and help “map” these workings (before I either make any more jokes way below the bar…or start craving real pie…) Too late… :)”

So, as not to waste the brave efforts of the Great Community People, there’s more to this blog!

First suggestion: try a different browser~!

One would assume that SharePoint would love Edge, but…how about a real fox…? Firefox it is!

Yeah, things just opened up as normal, everything was in the right place and the Copilot prompt box was just behaving as a prompt box should.
I have to confess though, that I’m still bothered by the fact there is no prompt box in the Chart Webpart itself and I am still of the opinion that, from end-user perspective, the reference to the chat pane could still use a clearer description like: “the Copilot chat pane to the right”. The current set-up just doesn’t feel natural to use for “normal” users.

Of course not! Every good webpart should be editable right (please do not confuse with “edible”, like pie).

So…as there was a chart, there also appeared the familiar edit button, along with the Copilot button.

Which button do we need to edit?

Of course…the Copilot button… (Really, this is not end-user friendly nor intuitive in my opinion)… The “edit” button did nothing, nada, niks. So…I need AI to change a simple thing like… the colour of the bars in my chart… Why? It literally takes me longer to formulate and type a prompt then to pick a colour, especially if I can pick from a colour wheel. Cause yeah, colours work visually better then playing a guessing game prompting to describe the colour you would prefer without having a hexcode library singing sweet melodies in your memory (if you do, I applaud you). This, this really is a design choice I cannot fully comprehend. If someone can explain the reasoning why prompting an invisible colour, triumphs picking a visible colour from a palette , please I am willing to learn 🙂

Anyway, for the sake of science, I set aside my principles and continued this little exploration.

“Change the colours of the bar to pine Green”

Done – the chart bars are now pine green

Are they? Are they really?

They are empty!

Sigh…

So I just did what any end-user would probably do by this point. Give up for the day and end your session with a smack on the “Publish” button.
And what did you know?
The “pine green” bars did appear.

Wild, huzzah.
Still…I would have love to edit some more on this webpart by just clicking the bits in the chart itself.
Like…What if I wanted to change the font of the axles for better readiblity? What if I wanted to change the language, cause I wrote my input in English, but it churned out Dutch (probably due to doing this on a Dutch tenant instead of an English one, but that’s my guess).
What if I wanted to give all the bars a different colour?
Of course I can prompt that, but…I really feel I can do that part faster and more efficient manually. I don’t know what font size it is now, so how many prompts to “make the font size of the axes” would I have to type in order to reach the point I am happy?
Not sure…

Did I overlook something?
Maybe?
Will the edit button ever work?
Who knows?