Dashboard

Dashboarders have been reading the recent posts on the relative merits and faults of using pie charts on business dashboards and have sent in plenty of comments in defense of pie charts. A common note has been that if you add hover-over functionality to pie chart slices, they work fine for dashboards. Seems that people do love their pie charts.

Several avid dashboard pie chart lovers mentioned that Business Objects Crystal Xcelsius pie charts are clear to read because of the tool-tip type of descriptive text that pops up when you mouse over the pie sections. I personally think that it’s because the Xcelsius pie charts are so darn shiny that they like them, but whatever.

Here is a good example of an Xcelsius pie chart. I put the cursor over one of the pie chart slices to bring up the box with the exact value of the KPI.

That screenshot is just an image. For the interactive version, please visit the Xcelsius dashboard example itself. It’s on the Business Objects Crystal Xcelsius examples site.

The dashboard is an example of a competitive market share dashboard. You can select between several different companies and see total revenue, cost of revenue and net income. You can select different quarters to compare trends.

On additional screens, you can compare income statements and revenue growth.

Here is the revenue growth comparision dashboard:

And here is the Income Statement dashboard:

Again, the nature of an Business Objects Xcelsius dashboard is that it is interactive with hover-over and clickable regions, so be sure to try out the demo.

One comment to you pie chart lovers - yes, having the hover-over explanation helps. But, I personally almost always favor explicit labeling over explanations that appear on mouse over. How would a newbie dashboard user even know to mouse over? Granted, they only have to try once, but I still like as much clarity without requiring action from the dashboard user.

What do you think?

Tags: Business Objects Crystal Xcelsius Dashboard Pie Chart Tooltips, Business Dashboard, Interactive Dashboard, Business Objects Dashboards

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Last Modified: Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 @ 00:43

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 12:39 am 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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