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From a simple excel dashboard to a fully integrated enterprise reporting suite, the Business Dashboard is being quickly adopted as the new face of Business Intelligence. It has a rapidly growing role in BI reporting and analysis.

An enterprise dashboard allows at-a-glance visualization of company health and monitoring of key performance indicators. Simple to understand and high in ROI, these executive dashboards are becoming "must-haves" for all enterprises. Easy-to-use by business users and fun-to-implement by the IT department, BI dashboard projects are quickly funded and politically popular.

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Don’t Eat the Dashboard Pie Chart

A dashboard means graphs. And, of course, graphs mean pie charts. Therefore dashboard means pie charts, doesn’t it? We all know and love the simple pie chart. Or do we? Is the pie chart really the best graph to place on our dashboards?

Dashboarding veteran Stephen Few issues some great warnings against using dashboard pie charts in his latest newsletter. The feature article entitled Save the Pies for Dessert explains why we dashboarders should not eat the pie.

Take a look at this excerpt. There is a great analysis of why line graphs are better than pie charts when comparing relative quantities:

why pie charts are not as good as line graphs

Stephen Few’s stance against the pie chart is well known. In his course on graph design, he shocks his students by railing against the use. They are quite during the class but come to him during the break to defend their frequent use of pie chart graphics.

In the article, Few does state that the pie graph does have its strengths - primarily that the “part to the whole” message very clearly comes through. Fractions are easily understood by all.

However, the difficulties of pie charting rapidly make themselves clear once you start portraying the data relationships typically found in enterprise dashboards. The advantages of line charts, bar graphs and other graph forms make the pie chart basically unusable.

Take a look at the article for the details. I think you’ll agree with me that this article on pie charting is destined to be the definitive guide to whether us dashboard designers should eat the pie chart or not.

The article also explains the history of the pie chart. I’ve exerpted some of the early pie chart graphs over at The Dashboard Spy site.

Tags: Dashboard Metrics, Dashboard Graphs, Dashboard Pie Chart, History of the Pie Chart, Pie Chart vs. Line Graph

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Last Modified: Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 @ 17:15

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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"Dashboards By Example - BI Dashboard Samples" is the theme and mission statement of this blog. We salute the Dashboard Spy in the field - those business users, project managers, IT executives, application designers, business intelligence experts, analysts, coders and subject matter experts who are on site creating this exciting and new "face of BI". Your business intelligence dashboard can go by many names - performance dashboard, executive dashboard, business dashboard, balanced scorecard, KPI metric summary, enterprise dashboard, bi dashboard, corporate dashboard. Whatever we call it, we believe that the at-a-glance visual approach is the key to user-centric design. Let's learn from each other's dashboard examples and continue to increase the level of usability and usefulness.

We strongly believe that the more dashboards you study, the more adept you will become at choosing correct design solutions for your company. "Learn by Example" is not just a motto - we take it literally, hence the name "Dashboards by Example". So take every chance you get to view examples of BI interfaces. As a matter of fact, take a second now, and study this dashboard example.

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The Dashboard Spy wants your dashboards!! I've collected over 1000 screenshots of business intelligence dashboards and scorecards for Volume 1 and now need you to send me the next 1000 dashboards for Volume 2. Email me at info at dashboardspy.com and tell me about your dashboard. Send me images, notes, technical details, business rules, metrics, KPIs, anything that you think your fellow Dashboard Spies will have an interest in. Keep this library of dashboarding resources going!

Also, I'd love more links to both the main Dashboard Spy site at http://dashboardspy.com and the Volume 1 blog of 1000 dashboards at http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com. I'd love your help in making these resources better known.

Looking forward to seeing your dashboards, The Dashboard Spy

P.S. Did you check out this free dashboard template for wireframing? Click on the image below for the download link and instructions. Consider it a gift for your unfailing support. Thank you very much. Sincerely, your friend in dashboarding, Dash.

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Don’t Eat the Dashboard Pie Chart

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