Save the pies for dessert!

Microsoft SQL Server User Group 5th October 2007

This was very interesting from a Reporting / Dashboard point of view!

Time was also convenient as Microsoft has just released Performance Point Server, their Hyperion/Cognos/Business Objects replacement product!

Stephen Few has two books out – one called “Show me the numbers!” and another called “Information Dashboard Design”.
I am definitely leaning towards getting his latest book …

He was a manager of a Business Intelligence team but wasn’t happy with a lot of standard charts and tables produced as they only served to confuse top executives!

So he quit to work on finding better ways to communicate with graphs and tables!

Most modern charts might look fancy but they don’t often help decision makers or anyone looking at them to really glean information.

He walked us through many examples of ones entered by software vendors in competitions plus from the software user documentation and in most cases showed how they weren’t effective in telling the story.

So it appears many people mislead without knowing as opposed to the old days when people lied with statistics.

He mentioned a book called how to lie with statistics and how this was a best seller!

Some vendors have some amazingly confusing charting features which are up there in the stratosphere for confusing people!

There was a charting guy called Edward Tuftie back in the 80’s and most of his ideas still hold in today’s reporting but very few use them.

This was more about what not to use versus what to use..

e.g. 3D charts look good but the human eye cannot work out the shades and angles.

Often tables can convey information better than charts.

Vertically orientated labels are very difficult to read.

Tables are good for individual values or mixing different types of data e.g. % and $...

Fancy terms like spark lines and blink graphs were thrown around…

Small multiples was a concept by Edward Tuftie in 1983…

This involves breaking up one chart into many charts.

E,g, Sales Per Month for different products.

Breaking this up into a chart for each product all on one page.

E.g. if you have 8 products then break this up into 8 mini charts!

That way one can glance at the figures to better see which product / products need attention etc.

But be careful as most people can only remember 4 chunks of information at a time!

10% of men cannot distinguish between green and red!

So often using shades of the one colour is better than having a traffic light approach!

He does this one day training and gets people walking out and making reports so much more informative!

At the end of the day a Dashboard should highlight what’s important.
Although in a discussion at work it appears that company annual reports use alot of pie charts as they don't want to easily show any anomalies etc to their readers!
So you are not always required to make numbers pop out of the page for decision makers ....

Some tools to investigate include:

Juice Analytics – used to have a free excel addin.

MicroCharts for Excel – bought by XLCubed? And there is a product called Chart Tamer?
http://www.xlcubed.com/en/Products_XLCUbed_MicroCharts.html

Tablo and Spot fire were also mentioned

When I did some checking on Juice Analytics foud this article which shows one of the silly things people do with charts that can easily mislead.

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/2007/06/excel-2007-and-lie-factor/

Found MicroCharts at BonaVista?

http://www.bonavistasystems.com/

Tom Bizannes is a SQL Server Professional in Sydney Australia.
http://www.smartbiz.com.au