You can patent data visualization ideas!? And those can be actually reinforced? You gotta be kidding me.

I thought there was a condition that for patent to be valid it must not be an idea that someone else can easily come up with.

Yes, it must not be an "obvious" idea.

However, they must use too narrow a definition of obvious, because many obvious things have software patents.

If this is indeed the case, it's just one more nugget of data to support the view that patent systems are utterly broken. There is nothing novel or inventive about these kinds of BI tools which warrants 20+ years of protected monopoly.

source?