Years ago, the President of the 200th largest company in the US at that time pointed to a tall stack of papers in the corner of his office.

"When I got this job," he said, "I was amazed at the amount of reports that I was expected to read. So I started stacking them in the corner. That stack grows by about a foot a month."

These days, many reports are online; but the problem remains. Excel users and others work long hours to prepare long reports for managers...who must work long hours to find meaning in all that data.

Technology is not the answer. To some degree, in fact, technology makes the problem worse. Today, unlike times past, many managers now can drill through their online reports, drill down into the underlying summary data, and drill through the summaries to view the underlying transactions themselves. While that technology is impressive, such data exploration can consume many hours of management time.

This is progress?

If technology isn't the answer, what is? Perhaps the answer is to improve the design of our management reports.

During the past several weeks I've had the pleasure of reading three recent books about reporting with graphs and tables. The books don't explain how to create these figures; they explain how to design them to be read and understood easily.

You'll find reviews of these books at Learn to Show Business Data That Readers Can Understand.

Introducing Dot Plots

One of the books I reviewed was by Naomi Robbins, who developed her reporting methodologies while working at Bell Labs. Naomi introduced me to dot plots.

To some degree, dot plots replace bar charts. They are more readable and more flexible than bar charts.

My article, Compare Metrics by Category Using Excel Dot Plot Charts, explains how to create dot plots in Excel.

To learn more about dot plots, you might want to read these articles by Naomi Robbins:

1. Dot Plots: A Useful Alternative to Bar Charts
2. Presenting Quantitative Information Effectively
3. Creating More Effective Graphs: Trellis Display

The third link discusses a useful way to structure graphical reports. Unfortunately, "Trellis" is trademarked by the Insightful Corp. Because this trademark can interfere with general usage, I started to use the term "checkerboard chart". Once you read about Trellis displays, you'll understand why "checkerboard chart" makes sense.

A Plug for Stephen Few's New Blog

About two months ago I received an email from Stephen Few. He wrote that he had discovered my ebook, wanted to read it, and asked if I wanted to trade my book for his new book about dashboards. I agreed. Soon after I started to read it, I rushed to Amazon and bought his first book.

Steve has a new blog that you might want to check out. He doesn't write about Excel, but he does write about Business Intelligence. BI, Steve writes, is "all about collecting, storing, accessing, analyzing, and reporting business information in an attempt to make sense out of it and communicate its meaning to support informed business decisions."

That sounds a lot like what Excel users do.

When you look at his blog, you'll notice that he wrote about ExcelUser and my ebook, Dashboard Reporting With Excel. After you read his short entry, it's reasonable to assume that we're also trading compliments. But that's not the way it happened. Honest. I wrote the reviews of Steve's books over the weekend and didn't see his blog entry until Tuesday.