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IncSight

QnE...WOW! Your Boss And Save Hours of Work Each Month

Catalog

Plug-n-Play Excel Dashboard Reporting...

Here s How to WOW! Your Boss And Save Hours of Work Each Month
A long-forgotten report from the Harvard Business Review supported by cutting-edge research and 30 years of spreadsheet development offers the fastest and easiest way to give your managers the business insight they need.
by Charley Kyd, Excel MVP These are tough times for many Excel users, and the organizations they work for. What about you? Are you and your managers working hard to solve a long list of business problems? Do your managers ask for reports and analyses that they seldom have time to study? Are you working long hours on Excel reporting? And just in caseAre you looking for a way to PROVE your professional and Excel skills in your resume? Am I close? Excel users all over the world are facing similar problems today. But problems like these aren t new. I first experienced them during the 1980 recession. Spreadsheets were new back then. But I worked long hours with them to report and analyze my company s business problems. First using VisiCalc, and then Lotus 1 2 3, I created hundreds of reports and analyses. Even with those primitive tools I gave my managers some great reports -- many tall stacks of them. My managers hated those reports, even though they had asked for many of them. They hated them for a very good reason: To get much value from my reports the managers needed to study them carefullylike homework. So, like homework, my managers usually set those pages aside until later. And then I would add another set of reports to the stack We were trapped. My managers needed that information desperately, buy they couldn t or wouldn t study my reports. Then I discovered a short article in the Harvard Business Review that showed me how to escape that trap. The article completely changed my ideas about management reporting. Here s how it began: This example of a 4x4 report from IncSight QnE is similar to the report that George Blake shared with HBR readers more than 30 years ago.

Of all the frustrations of business life, surely one of the most aggravating and persistent is the flood of paper. Until a year ago, I used to update my mental portrait of my company by wading through a 100-page monthly budget report full of data on the corporation, the divisions, the profit centers, and the products. To round out the picture, I also slogged through a series of smaller reports on collections, bank loans, and the like. These added perhaps 50 pages to my pile. Now I get a better picture from just one sheet of paper. George B. Blake, Graphic shorthand as an aid to managers, Harvard Business Review, March-April, 1978, page 6.

Desperate to find solutions to our problems, I was working long hours to generate reports by the truckloadreports that my managers ignored. But this guy had found a way to replace that growing mountain of paper with just one sheet. What a concept! His example report was amazing. Like the examples shown on this page, it used many small charts to show trends in performance. In just a few seconds, a page like the example at the right helped him and other managers get a true picture of performance. My mountain of paper never could have provided that insight, even if managers had studied the reports for hours. Today, we would call Blake s report a dashboard report.

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How Science Supports Chart-Rich Dashboard Reports

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How Science Supports Chart-Rich Dashboard Reports

IncSight

QnE...WOW! Your Boss And Save Hours of Work Each Month

In recent years, scientists have learned a lot about the way humans absorb visual information. Their findings support my enthusiasm for using small, simple charts for management reporting. Specifically, the psychologists have explained why people can read dashboard charts quickly, find their meaning automatically, and remember many charts easily: This figure shows a 2x5 report similar to George Blake's example from more than 30 years ago.

1. People Can Read Small Charts More Quickly Than Numbers

Research shows that as you read this sentence, your eye is making between two and five snapshots -- called saccades -- per second. At a typical reading distance, each saccade has a diameter about the size of the word "snapshot". Each time you read a number in a report, your eye takes at least one snapshot. Reading many numbers requires many snapshots. Searching for trends and other patterns in all those numbers requires not only mental gymnastics, but many more snapshots. Searching for patterns in numeric data is hard work! In contrast, your managers and other readers can see the meaning of small, simple charts in less than a second. Readers can see trends, seasonalities, variances, correlations, and other patterns at a glance. Searching for patterns in charted data is a breeze!

A 'Cheerful Endorsement' from an Energy Consultant

Charley, You're my hero. This is incredibly slick. I'm an independent consultant, and this should WOW a lot of clients. And you absolutely can quote me. A dashboard like this is an eye-catcher. It allows my reports to look incredibly slick, but without slow manual processing. With your reports, the report can be run as fast as you can update the data. They will reflect VERY favorably on my consultancy. This is a very cheerful endorsement. Mark Johnson, Principal Vector Group Services The Colony, Texas

2. People Can Find Meaning In Charts Automatically

When humans see images, we automatically find connections with information in our long-term memory. Scientists call this gist.

When we look at an image, including charts, gist memory processes the information immediately and determines how it fits into our existing storehouse of knowledge. Before we even have time to think about it, our brain looks for patterns in the visual data. Research shows that our brains can find the gist of an image as quickly as one-tenth of a second! So when we use charts, we automatically give our brains a quick and easy way to find meaning in our data.

3. People Can Remember a Massive Amount of Chart Content

Visual long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details This intriguing statement is also the title of an article published in the September, 2008, edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . We found that observers could successfully remember details about thousands of images after only a single viewing, the four authors from MIT wrote. The present results demonstrate visual memory is a massive store that is not exhausted by a set of 2,500 detailed representations of objects. There are at least two practical reasons this discovery is important for management reporting. First, it s difficult for humans to remember numbers long enough to compare one set of them to others. But it s easy for us to remember and compare one chart to others. Therefore, chart-rich ns a total of 42 workbooks. These include 4 database orkbooks for actual data, with one file each for weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual data. (Have you ever used a database workbook before? These simple files show you how it's done.) 4 m atching database orkbooks for target data. (If you don t have targets for some data series, it s not a problem. Just erase the sample data.) 18 orkbooks ith

A Detailed Endorsement From a Medical Manager

Charley, I work for Emergency Physicians of Tidewater, a group of ER doctors. I create charts every month that display things like profits per partner FTEs, expected profits and ROI, billing volume, average charge per patient, collection rate percentages, and LWBS (left without being seen) patients. I have about a dozen Excel worksheets that distill into one workbook, and a separate workbook to drive the 48 charts. (We work in 7 hospitals, which each have charts for patient volume, charge per patient, ROI, collection rate, profits, and LWBS). Our group has 71 MDs, 34 PAs, and about 20 residents, and every one of them is anal, over-analytical, and extremely numbers-oriented, which is good for me and Excel. Needless to say, there's currently a lot of manual updating that goes into these, and QnE will go a long way in standardizing and automating a lot of it. Several of my current charts have trend lines and multiple Y axes, but I

IncSight QnE's "7x4" landscape report makes 728 data points easy to read. (728=28 charts x 13 months x 2 series)

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18 orkbooks ith current charts have trend lines and multiple Y axes, but I landscape reports that get really like the clean look of your charts. their data from the database files. Each file can report a Brent Evens, Operations Manager different number of charts, Emergency Physicians of Tidewater from 2x2 (two charts wide Virginia Beach, Virginia by two charts high), to 2x3, 2x4, 3x2, and so on, through 7x4. (No matter how few or how many charts you need, you ll Your Resume probably find a workbook that can display them.) 16 orkbooks ith portrait reports that have layouts from 2x2 through 5x5 charts per page. Like the landscape workbooks, these include two report worksheets, each with the same layout but with a different use of colors. (Have you ever created reports linked to a database file? A similar technique works very well for tabular reports.)

IncSight

QnE...WOW! Your Boss And Save Hours of Work Each Month

and Excel Dashboards

If you give potential employers a copy of an Excel dashboard, you could achieve at least three objectives: 1. You could get their attention, and help them to remember you. 2. You could demonstrate your Excel skills in ways that few other Excel users could. 3. You could give them a list of measures of interest to their organizations, measures that you re prepared to discuss in detail. The final item probably is key. Your sample dashboard should contain performance measures, economic indicators, or other public data that would interest a potential employer in your industry. By choosing the measures carefully, you can discuss how your professional experience and capabilities are closely matched with the employer's needs. A similar approach also could work with prospective clients.

Excel users all over the world are using my earlier dashboard products. Here's a recent summary of users by continent and country. What attracted E cel users to m dashboard reports. products were the pages of chart-rich

What m ade E cel users lo al to m products was the system of formulas that controls and summarizes the data, and supports the charts. Those simple formulas turn a mere page of charts into a powerful dashboard system. The formulas pull the data you specify from the Excel database. They scale the data. They add units of measure. They convert date serial numbers into the date labels you specify. They synchronize target and actual data. In short, those sim ple form ulas are the hidden po er of m dashboard reports. E cel

Compare IncSight QnE and IncSight DB

Two sets of Excel dashboard templates are available, IncSight DB and IncSight QnE. This table compares them. Information IncSight DB IncSight QnE Link to description page IncSight DB IncSight QnE (this page) Short description More powerful Fastest updating Number of report templates 20 templates 34 templates Number of color schemes 20 color schemes 2 color schemes Reports use a mixture of charts of various Each report uses a matrix of same-size Report Styles sizes, and many include tables. charts, from 2x2 through 7x4. Yes, using up to four values from the Reports calculate ratios and other values No database per calculation Data management method Links to an Excel database Links to an Excel database Typical setup time Less than an hour Less than ten minutes Typical update time A few seconds A few seconds Y-axis (value-axis) scaling Automatic Automatic The Y axes of selected charts can be Yes No synchronized automatically Default time periods Month Week, Month, Quarter, Year Display number-format settings for dates Manually adjustable Three quick-click options Price $59.00 $49.00 $59.00 $49.00

IncSight QnE is our quickest and easiest Excel dashboard product yet. It lets you go from fuzzy data to professional dashboards in less than ten minutes. Just copy and paste your organization's data to an Excel data template. Enter your chart titles. Choose among 16 portrait and 18 landscape dashboard templates. Then print professionallooking Excel dashboard reports. New Excel version: PC Excel 2007-2010: Mac Excel 2008-2011: Classic Excel version: PC Excel '97-2003: Mac Excel 2004: $49 USD

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