Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Explore Professional or higher |
| Access | Agent |
A correct report nobody understands has failed. The formatting that decides whether it gets read.
Format it
- Give it a title that states the question.
- Label the axes and set sensible units.
- Sort so the answer is visible.
- Set decimals: whole numbers for counts, one decimal at most for times.
- Add a note saying what is included and excluded.
The title is the sentence
"Tickets solved per week, last quarter, excluding spam" tells a reader everything they need. "Tickets" tells them nothing and invites the wrong conclusion.
Units, always
A response time of 4.2 is meaningless: hours, minutes or days changes everything. Times especially get quoted out of context, and the unit has to travel with the number.
Round properly
A first reply time of 3.847291 hours is not more accurate, it is harder to read. Whole minutes or one decimal place.
Say what is excluded
Spam removed, one brand omitted, a group left out. Those choices are the definition of the number, and a reader who does not know them will compare it with something else and find a discrepancy.
Colour carries meaning or nothing
Use it to mean something: one series highlighted, or good and bad. Twelve colours because there are twelve categories is decoration that makes the chart harder to read.
Look at it on a laptop screen
Dashboards get read on smaller screens than they are built on. A chart with fourteen labels is legible in the builder and unreadable in the meeting where it matters.
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