Crystal Reports Administration: Avoiding Information Overload in your Reports

No matter how accurate or good-looking your reports are, people won't read them if they contain too much information. Information overload causes information rejection. In this article, we'll address:

• Why reports get overloaded initially
• How reports bloat over time
• The guiding principles
• Unbloating existing reports

Why reports get overloaded initially

Of the many causes, the most common one is people want to feel important. So, they insist that X, Y, or Z be in the report. Politics being what they are, all three end up in the report plus X prime, Y prime, and Z prime.

People forget the purpose of the report, to begin with. The report consequently becomes a vehicle for people to get ego strokes or compete for presumed job security points. What makes matters especially bad is the most bureaucratic people--those who have the least information of any real value to share--become disproportionately represented in the reports.

Report recipients quickly tire of wading through superfluous information, and simply disregard the report in its entirety.
 

How reports bloat over time

The report may start out just fine, with many happy users. But then someone sees an opportunity to use the report for his or her own agenda. A few adds here, a few adds there, and the report begins to resemble War and Peace.

Another way reports bloat over time is new information must be added, but the old information isn't removed. For example, the VP of Sales wants the report to show profit by region. That gets added, but the report continues to contain total revenue by region even though nobody uses that information anymore. These incomplete changes add up, until the report contains more irrelevant information than relevant information.

A third way this happens is the scope increases. What was the Marketing Report becomes the Sales and Marketing Report, and then the Sales and Marketing and R&D Report, and so forth. These should be separate reports.

The guiding principles

To keep your reports relevant to users, you have to think in terms of meeting their needs.

• Determine the purpose of each report. Find out from users what they need, and poll them occasionally to see how you're doing. You may need to redesign reports to meet changing needs.
• Stay focused on the purpose. Rather than allow the scope of a successful report to grow, create separate subreports or reports for each purpose.
• Determine the audience. Base the original recipient list on "need to know." Provide an easy way for people to give you feedback on what they need or don't need in a report. You can use a report scheduler to send specific reports to specific lists of people automatically.
• Use meaningful graphics. Consider using a third party graphics tool to enhance the graphical message of your report.
• Keep it lean. Generally, less is more. Don't crowd the report with boilerplate, meaningless graphics, or other things that don't serve the purpose of the report.

Unbloating existing reports

If your existing reports have become weapons of mass irrelevance, you need to find out what exactly can be cut. It isn't necessary to make a huge project out of this.

Just pick a report, and ask report recipients to tell you what they need that's in the report. Anything not specifically identified as needed will be dropped from the report. You will probably see patterns along departmental lines. Such patterns reveal the specific ways you need to target your report design and delivery.

A tool that will help you document all of this is Report Analyzer. Download the trial copy, and you'll see how it can help you clean up your reporting system. And remember--if your reports are irrelevant, management may just decide that you are irrelevant also. Keep them relevant by eliminating information overload.

This article is copyrighted by Crystalkeen, Mindconnection, and Chelsea Technologies Ltd. It may be freely copied and distributed as long as the original copyright is displayed and no modifications are made to this material. Extracts are permitted. The names Crystal Reports and Seagate Info are trademarks owned by Business Objects.