Are You Dense?
By Charley Kyd
How dense do you make your dashboards?
Suppose you want to report monthly performance for your company. Let's say you want to chart the most-recent 13 months of sales, average gross profit margins, cash flows, headcounts, dollars of returned goods, and other key metrics--all compared to budget.
What strategy do you use to present these measures? You have two choices: sparse or dense.
With the sparse approach, you put only a few measures on an Xcelsius screen, and then provide controls to let users switch from screen to screen. To illustrate, for any month and division you might provide screen categories like Revenues, Cash Flow, Personnel, Expenses, and so on.
With the dense approach, you display as many measures as you can on one Xcelsius screen. To do so, you make your charts as small as possible and put them as close together as possible. With this approach, you can combine many sparse screens into a few dense ones.
Which approach is best?
If you search the Web for examples of dashboard reports, the sparse approach is the most common. In fact, other than at my Web site it's hard to find an example of a dense dashboard report. And because we all tend to rely on the examples we see, I suspect that most companies also create sparse dashboards.
Sparse dashboards probably are the most common, but are they always the best?
In the early days of Excel, charts were extremely sparse because Excel could print just one chart per page. During that time I often saw managers cover their desks, or a wall, with pages of large charts. Then they could stand back from the charts and visually compare them.
Because they could see many measures of performance at a time, managers could see each measure in rich context. This context helped them to identify potential problems that were hidden when they viewed only one chart at a time:
- Why did Accounts Receivable decrease while Revenues increased?
- Why is Marketing the only department that consistently exceeds their budget?
- Why has Cash been falling while Accounts Receivable has been rising?
- Why has Headcount drifted upwards while monthly Revenues have been flat?
The problem with this approach was managers couldn't just read a report; they first had to paper a wall with it.
To resolve this problem, I began to add as many small charts and other figures as possible to one printed page of a report. By doing so, I could condense a many-page report into one page that offered much more context. That is, I improved the report significantly by turning the sparse report into a dense one.
This approach works very well with Xcelsius.
With Xcelsius, you can place about 20 charts on one screen at a time. Each chart can show 12 months of actual and budgeted performance. By using one dense screen, a manager can quickly review a lot of performance information in rich context.
So are dense reports always the best? Not at all. I can think of two common circumstances where sparse reports are best:
- First, many Xcelsius displays are about one or two specific subjects; they're not intended as a general status report, as my example describes. It makes no sense to clutter a clean, targeted display with irrelevant detail merely to turn a sparse report into a dense one.
- Second, many Xcelsius figures map complex relationships. These figures demand more screen real estate than do the simple line charts I've discussed here. If you need the space to display a more complex figure, you must take it. As a general rule, however, I suspect that because sparse dashboards have been the default design for so long--in both Excel and Xcelsius--that both could be improved by making them denser.
Try it. I think you'll find that at times it's good to be dense.
Charley Kyd is the founder of www.ExcelUser.com and the author of several books about using Excel for management reporting and analysis. He consults with both large and small companies about ways to improve those activities.