More Dashboard Ramblings
- Details
- Category: General
- Published on Saturday, 18 February 2012 15:07
- Written by Dave Green
I mentioned dashboards in a previous post and how if you have ever presented a summary of the workbooks contents on single pages then you have basically been using Dashboards for years…
Well, I still stand by this, but I have a few issues with the current trend of Dashboards being pushed at every opportunity, as I think they tend towards data overload, with far too much emphasis on putting nothing but graphs on the page – and lots of them.
The premise for this seems to be that the recipient / reader of this summary is in too much of a hurry to read anything and only wants to look at graphs to get a feel that things are trending in the right direction. To me this is akin to presenting a PowerPoint presentation without actually talking about the information projected on the wall.
If your boss is only interested enough to spend literally seconds looking at a few charts to see that things are going ok, it says to me that either the data you are presenting isn’t that important to him (its important to the business, but isn’t the stuff that’s going to make or break it) or he’s too busy to really take this in. Either case would be concerning to me.
You may argue that the Dashboard is there to provoke discussion; however any report should be able to be used by a recipient without having to rely on someone else to explain it. In short your summary (or Dashboard if you prefer) should be annotated so the reader clearly understands the figures and any underlying trends or issues which may not be self-evident from one of many graphs crammed onto a single sheet.
So what’s my suggestion on this? Simple – don’t cram it all onto one sheet. If the data is important and you want people to understand it then you should ensure they do. Data overload is the same as ‘death by PowerPoint’ – not nice and not necessary.
Breaking the summary up into sections and presenting them on several sheets allows for the charts to be sized and annotated making them meaningful.
“Hang on – surely it doesn’t matter if you put loads on a spread sheet in a modern workbook you have hundreds of columns and thousands of rows to play with?” I hear you ask. Well yes, but how many times do you print out things because it’s easier to read on paper than on the screen? You recipient is just the same. Also, there is a natural tendency to scroll down but not so much to scroll to the right. And if this is the case then there is a possibility for your recipient to miss important data if they have to scroll down or across too much.
So you want to make sure your recipient knows that the summary data is on multiple sheets – well there are several ways you can do this: