Duncan's Diurnal Diatribe: 2020

22.11.20

You Idiot ...

Since 1995, when I first connected to the internet, I have had web sites, blogs, I post prolifically to quora.com, I give away hundreds of files a year ... someone asks me a question and I do my best to answer it. Unless I think a student has posted his homework question, hoping to get the work done for him, I answer questions honestly and in full. That can take me five minutes or even five hours, sometimes more. That's what I do. Yesterday I posted a question on a discussion list about the ACF and PACF functions in R ... simple for anyone who knows R well but difficult for me I had spent a long time looking at the ACF and PCF help files, I had searched the web for answers, I had watched videos on YouTube. It could be that, in my ignorance, I didn't frame my question so well because the first two answers didn't answer my question. Of course, that can happen but one respondent said to me, before posting questions here, it is best to look at the help files first. I was motivated to solve this problem by myself now and I did! I did it. Blow me, though; but another smart alek posted an "answer" to my question by telling me that there are many tutorials I could search for and read ... and of course he didn't tell me where to find those tutorials or which tutorials I might find and read. I doubt very much I will post another question to that list! DW

14.11.20

Ludicrous Dashboard

I just saw a post on facebook in which someone shared their dashboard. Gushing comments followed: awesome ... fantastic use of screen real estate ... always love your work ...

There is a link to the video showing how the dashboard was created. He was also gushing about how he set it up to change things at the click of a mouse button. You know, linking one cell to another cell.

Here is my point: on every screen of this dashboard there are 12 or more metrics/values for each of seven departments ... 84 per screen. Given that he has used sparklines, images, sliders, values ... it is ludicrous to expect anyone to get any value from such a dashboard without having to zoom to, say, 50% or so, thus ruining the desired effect of the thing, surely.

Still, everyone else gushingly loved it. More than that, more and more Excel bloggers are adding more and more features to their own dashboards. Why? Because they can. Why is that so bad? Because it leads to clutter and will have performance implications. But more than that: what happens when Jack or Jenny breaks a link or changes something wrongly?

I suggest you go back to or stay with management by eye, from the old days. 15 ideas on an A4 page or equivalent was an excellent rule of thumb.

Duncan Williamson

14th November 2020

Comments on this Blog

I have just found a few comments sent to me here dating all the way back to 2015. I just saw them!! I have approved all of them so if you suddenly find me popping up to say, thanks for a comment you had completely forgotten about ... now you know why! DW 14/11/2020

I am coming back here

People still come here from time to time, even though I haven't been posting here very often over the last few years and my main blog at the moment is my Excel blog over at excelmaster.co. Hoever, it looks like the covid-19 pandemic is forcing me out of that home and I will be using this blog as my main blog again. You can always find me on www.quora.com, too, answering Excel and other questions. I work in fits and starts there but I have uploaded a lot more than 1,000 answers already. So, welcome back here and I look forward to seeing more and more of you here as we move into the new year ... almost! Duncan Williamson 14th November 2020