incsight® qne

3/13/12 IncSight® QnE...WOW! Your Boss And Save Hours of Work Each Month

1/4www.exceluser.com/catalog2/templates/is-qne.htm

This example of a 4x4 reportfrom IncSight QnE is similar tothe report that George Blakeshared with HBR readers morethan 30 years ago.

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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 case…Are you looking for a way to PROVE your professional and Excel skills in yourresume?

Am I close?

Excel users all over the world are facing similar problems today. But problems like these aren’t new. I firstexperienced them during the 1980 recession.

Spreadsheets were new back then. But I worked long hours with them to report and analyze mycompany’s business problems. First using VisiCalc, and then Lotus 1ϣ2ϣ3, I created hundreds of reportsand analyses.

Even with those primitive tools I gave my managers some great reports -- many tall stacks of them. Mymanagers hated those reports, even though they had asked for many of them. They hated them for avery good reason:

To get much value from my reports the managers needed to study them carefully…like homework. So, likehomework, my managers usually set those pages aside until later. And then I would add another set ofreports to the stack…

We were trapped. My managers needed that information desperately, buy they couldn’t or wouldn’tstudy my reports.

Then I discovered a short article in the Harvard Business Review that showed me how to escape thattrap. The article completely changed my ideas about management reporting.

Here’s how it began:

“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 thecorporation, 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 50pages 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 thetruckload…reports that my managers ignored. But this guy had found a way to replace that growingmountain 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 toshow trends in performance.

In just a few seconds, a page like the example at the right helped him and other managers get a truepicture of performance. My mountain of paper never could have provided that insight, even if managershad studied the reports for hours.

Today, we would call Blake’s report a dashboard report.

How Science Supports Chart-Rich Dashboard Reports



This figure shows a 2x5 reportsimilar to George Blake'sexample from more than 30years ago.

A 'Cheerful Endorsement' from an EnergyConsultant

Charley,

You're my hero. This is incredibly slick. I'm an independentconsultant, 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 reportsto look incredibly slick, but without slow manualprocessing. With your reports, the report can be run as fastas you can update the data.

They will reflect VERY favorably on my consultancy.

This is a very cheerful endorsement.

Mark Johnson, PrincipalVector Group ServicesThe Colony, Texas

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

A Detailed Endorsement From a MedicalManager

Charley,

I work for Emergency Physicians of Tidewater, a group of ERdoctors. I create charts every month that display things likeprofits per partner FTEs, expected profits and ROI, billingvolume, average charge per patient, collection ratepercentages, and LWBS (left without being seen) patients.

I have about a dozen Excel worksheets that distill into oneworkbook, and a separate workbook to drive the 48 charts.(We work in 7 hospitals, which each have charts for patientvolume, charge per patient, ROI, collection rate, profits, andLWBS).

Our group has 71 MDs, 34 PAs, and about 20 residents, andevery one of them is anal, over-analytical, and extremelynumbers-oriented, which is good for me and Excel.

Needless to say, there's currently a lot of manual updatingthat goes into these, and QnE will go a long way instandardizing and automating a lot of it. Several of mycurrent charts have trend lines and multiple Y axes, but I

How Science Supports Chart-Rich Dashboard Reports

In recent years, scientists have learned a lot about the way humans absorb visual information. Theirfindings support my enthusiasm for using small, simple charts for management reporting.

Specifically, the psychologists have explained why people can read dashboard charts quickly, find theirmeaning automatically, and remember many charts easily:

1. People Can Read Small Charts More Quickly Than Numbers

Research shows that as you read this sentence, your eye is makingbetween two and five snapshots -- called saccades -- per second. At atypical reading distance, each saccade has a diameter about the size ofthe word "snapshot".

Each time you read a number in a report, your eye takes at least onesnapshot. Reading many numbers requires many snapshots. Searching fortrends and other patterns in all those numbers requires not only mentalgymnastics, but many more snapshots.

Searching for patterns in numeric data is hard work!

In contrast, your managers and other readers can see the meaning ofsmall, 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!

2. People Can Find Meaning In Charts Automatically

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

When we look at an image, including charts, gist memory processes theinformation immediately and determines how it fits into our existingstorehouse 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 asecond!

So when we use charts, we automatically give our brains a quick and easy way to find meaning in ourdata.

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, editionof the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We found that observers could successfully remember details about thousands of images afteronly a single viewing,” the four authors from MIT wrote. “The present results demonstrate visualmemory is a massive store that is not exhausted by a set of 2,500 detailed representations ofobjects.”

There are at least two practical reasons this discovery is important for management reporting.

First, it’s difficult for humans toremember numbers long enoughto compare one set of them toothers. But it’s easy for us toremember and compare one chartto others. Therefore, chart-rich nsa total of 42 workbooks. Theseinclude…

4 database workbooks foractual data, with one fileeach for weekly, monthly,quarterly, and annual data.(Have you ever used adatabase workbook before?These simple files show youhow it's done.) 4 matching databaseworkbooks for targetdata. (If you don’t havetargets for some data series,it’s not a problem. Just erasethe sample data.) 18 workbooks with



Your Resume and Excel Dashboards

If you give potential employers a copy of an Exceldashboard, you could achieve at least three objectives:

1. You could get their attention, and help them toremember you.

2. You could demonstrate your Excel skills in ways thatfew other Excel users could.

3. You could give them a list of measures of interest totheir organizations, measures that you’re prepared todiscuss in detail.

The final item probably is key. Your sample dashboardshould contain performance measures, economicindicators, or other public data that would interest apotential employer in your industry. By choosing themeasures carefully, you can discuss how yourprofessional experience and capabilities are closelymatched with the employer's needs.

A similar approach also could work with prospectiveclients.

New Excel version:—PC Excel 2007-2010:—Mac Excel 2008-2011:

$49 USD

Classic Excel version:—PC Excel '97-2003:—Mac Excel 2004:

$49 USD

current charts have trend lines and multiple Y axes, but Ireally like the clean look of your charts.

Brent Evens, Operations ManagerEmergency Physicians of TidewaterVirginia Beach, Virginia

18 workbooks withlandscape reports that gettheir data from the databasefiles. Each file can report adifferent number of charts,from 2x2 (two charts wideby two charts high), to 2x3,2x4, 3x2, and so on,through 7x4. (No matter how few or how many charts you need, you’llprobably find a workbook that can display them.) 16 workbooks with portrait reports that have layouts from 2x2 through5x5 charts per page. Like the landscape workbooks, these include tworeport worksheets, each with the same layout but with a different use ofcolors. (Have you ever created reports linked to a database file? A similartechnique works very well for tabular reports.)

Excel users all over the world are using my earlier dashboard products. Here's arecent summary of users by continent and country.

What attracted Excel users to my products were the pages of chart-richdashboard reports.

What made Excel users loyal to my products was the system of formulasthat controls and summarizes the data, and supports the charts.

Those simple formulas turn a mere page of charts into a powerful dashboardsystem.

The formulas pull the data you specify from the Excel database. They scale thedata. They add units of measure. They convert date serial numbers into the datelabels you specify. They synchronize target and actual data.

In short, those simple formulas are the hidden power of my Exceldashboard reports.

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

Report StylesReports use a mixture of charts of varioussizes, and many include tables.

Each report uses a matrix of same-sizecharts, from 2x2 through 7x4.

Reports calculate ratios and other valuesYes, using up to four values from thedatabase per calculation

No

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 besynchronized automatically

Yes No

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 dashboardproduct yet. It lets you go from fuzzy data to professionaldashboards in less than ten minutes.

Just copy and paste your organization's data to an Excel datatemplate. Enter your chart titles. Choose among 16 portrait and18 landscape dashboard templates. Then print professional-looking Excel dashboard reports.

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