Annotations

Annotations are a useful function that you can use to explain aspects of a Spotfire analysis. They can be placed anywhere on a page and can be styled too. Annotations are also useful for producing infographics in Spotfire, as we will see later on.

You can continue with the same analysis as before. It doesn't really matter what we do with annotations, so I just want to introduce you to the concept. Let's get started:

1. If you are using the Analyst client, click the Visualizations menu and select New annotation...:

1. If you are using the web clients, you will first need to switch to the Editing mode by clicking the dropdown in the top-right corner of the Spotfire application. Then the steps are the same as the ones following.

1. Spotfire will place the annotation on the page. You can drag it wherever you want and start editing. Here, you can see I've started typing a description of the KPI charts:

1. I'm not going to talk you through all the steps to configure an annotation, but I will mention them in brief. From left to right, the controls are as follows:
   • Background color—a standard color chooser (including eye-dropper—Analyst clients only)
   • Foreground color—as for background color
   • Decrease font size
   • Increase font size
   • Duplicate the annotation
   • Remove the annotation

Annotations can be resized horizontally—they will resize vertically automatically. The angle bracket in the top-left corner of the annotation will hide the annotation—it can be shown again by clicking on its icon left in place on the page.

Another potential use for annotations is to produce infographics. You can match the colors in the annotations to the colors you use in visualizations and produce some pretty nicely styled visualizations with real impact!