Micro Charting

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this module, I'm reaching temporarily to a different data set, mainly because I
• 00:09 want to show you something that actually got used in the real world.
• 00:13 This is an inventory management dashboard that is based on the format that
• 00:17 we actually deployed in order to check whether or
• 00:20 not inventory counts were being conducted properly.
• 00:24 This particular dashboard here was reviewed and
• 00:26 it took about 15 seconds per line.
• 00:28 The entire point was does the inventory count look reasonable and if it does,
• 00:32 we move on.
• 00:33 If it doesn't, we send somebody back to recount or look for a reason why.
• 00:36 Let me show you how many charts are actually on this page,
• 00:39 because this is one of the key things.
• 00:41 We always want to make sure dashboards are restricted to one page and one page only,
• 00:45 because that's all the attention that we have.
• 00:48 Well here, how many charts are there?
• 00:50 There's a lot, and they're tiny.
• 00:53 But remember, the point here was not to figure out what was going wrong,
• 00:57 the point was to figure out if something was going wrong.
• 01:00 To see whether or not something needed to be changed.
• 01:02 We would quickly scan this and say,
• 01:03 does the actual revenue look like it's in line with budget?
• 01:06 Is it reasonable?
• 01:07 Is it what we expect based on what's happened this period?
• 01:10 Is there a theoretical shrinkage going up too high, or is swinging?
• 01:14 What's happening with the actual versus budgeted costs that get sold?
• 01:17 And do these things all make sense in context?
• 01:19 So we would go down, and we would take a look at these.
• 01:21 And if you saw a chart that did something like this where we've got a huge
• 01:25 shrinkage that came out.
• 01:26 We would send our manager back to do an inventory recount at this point because
• 01:30 something looked wrong.
• 01:32 We might see that if something was left that the way,
• 01:35 the next month it would go the other direction.
• 01:36 We'd say okay, that looks like a correction and we're okay with that.
• 01:39 But this is it.
• 01:40 About 15 seconds per line to look at all four of the charts for
• 01:43 each individual product type and boom, they're off and running.
• 01:46 The question is how do we build these?
• 01:48 Because every one of these is a tiny chart.
• 01:50 And it's a real chart.
• 01:51 How do I know?
• 01:52 Well, because I can select the chart and
• 01:55 if I go to print preview, I can see the full page version of it.
• 01:59 This makes it a chart.
• 02:01 This is one of the features that's actually there.
• 02:02 So no matter how small you make your chart,
• 02:04 you can always blow it up to a full size screen, which is kind of cool.
• 02:08 So how do we build the individual components?
• 02:10 Well, let's take a look at the dashboard source page for a second.
• 02:14 There's lots of data, tons of data and you'll notice that on the right hand side
• 02:19 we have the individual charts that we created.
• 02:22 If I go and zoom in on this page a little bit more you can see that we can get into
• 02:26 the chart, we can grab it and we can take a look at, let's say the title.
• 02:32 Notice the title font-size, it's 7.2 font.
• 02:36 What about the axis size?
• 02:37 It's six point, six point and six point.
• 02:42 So basically what we did is we grabbed every one of these
• 02:45 charts that was created by default.
• 02:47 And we went through each individual element customizing it
• 02:51 to change the font sizes down to as small we we could get them so
• 02:54 that we could shrink these guys down.
• 02:56 You'll notice that six point isn't even in the ledger here.
• 03:00 If I wanted to go and try and make this four point, I could do that and
• 03:03 make it even tinier.
• 03:04 Okay, so even though you don't see that option by default, it is there.
• 03:07 And we customized every single element to make these things as small as we
• 03:11 possibly could.
• 03:13 This was the secret to what we call micro charting.
• 03:16 It uses real charts to plot real data but with a really, really shrunk down feature.
• 03:22 So that when we actually use the regular pieces, let me show you what happens if we
• 03:25 go the other way and we set this back to what you might see by default.
• 03:28 We would get charts that look like this, which really wouldn't
• 03:32 help us very much at all, so that's why we shrink all these things down.
• 03:35 So that as we scroll them open and close using our little arrows on the side here,
• 03:40 that shows nicely in this particular format.
• 03:42 But when we shrink it down, we want those font sizes smaller.
• 03:45 One other thing that's probably of note in this particular dashboard here
• 03:51 is this particular area with this label.
• 03:54 You'll notice that this cell is actually merged and centered in order to actually
• 03:57 make a vertical label that is Showing in this particular fashion.
• 04:02 So we went to format cells, we merged it and we've rotated our text.
• 04:09 This is how we were able to actually get these bands that show up for
• 04:12 bottled beer with the four charts that we actually have here as well.
• 04:15 So again, it's a different set of techniques for working with these.
• 04:19 But the nice piece about this is we can take these charts,
• 04:22 we can shrink down all the elements.
• 04:23 Every single piece is selectable, so
• 04:25 we can make the lines a little bit thinner if these are a little bit too big.
• 04:29 We could grab one of these lines here and say you know what,
• 04:31 I wanna format the data series on this.
• 04:33 I'm gonna go to the fill, I'll take a look at the line and
• 04:37 maybe I'll change this to say make this line a little bit finer.
• 04:39 We want a little bit thinner just to make sure that the chart shrinks down properly.
• 04:43 So every element can be customized to make it as small as possible to make the chart
• 04:48 still render when you shrink it down, so you can fit as many as you want on a page.
• 04:52 Remember that the point again is very quick access to the data
• 04:57 to identify problems.
• 04:58 And if your charts can do that you can use this technique to make an entire page of
• 05:01 them that can be reviewed in just a couple of minutes.

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