Zebra BI has been launched on 24th of July 2014 at HICHERT@IBCS conference in Frankfurt. Get your free 30-day trial at zebra.bi!!! Read more – ‘Zebra BI has been launched!’.
We have developed Zebra BI, a smart Excel chart maker, which will help you create financial reports. Zebra BI transforms your Excel data into understandable and meaningful reports in just a few clicks. Your reports can excel in just a few seconds! Zebra BI is now available for free beta testing at: zebra.bi Read more – ‘Zebra BI available for beta testing!’.
Dr. Rolf Hichert, Europe’s leading expert on business communication, came to Slovenia for a working visit. On October 17th he thrilled the audience at the 13th Adriatic ICV Controlling conference in Bled with an inspiring lecture. The next day he spent with our team in Ljubljana, discussing the further development of our new product Zebra [...] Read more – ‘Dr. Rolf Hichert on a working visit to Slovenia’.
Andrej Lapajne recevied the title HCC – Hichert Certified Consultant on the 17th of June 2013 in Frankfurt, Germany. The title is awarded by the organisation HICHERT + PARTNER for the implementation of HICHERT ® SUCCESS, a methodology for achieving successful business communication. Lapajne had thus become the first Hichert Certified Consultant outside DACH (Germany, [...] Read more – ‘Andrej Lapajne received the title Hichert Certified Consultant’.
In his “serial art” Andy Warhol was using image repetition (multiplication) as a means to achieve the feeling of detachment and to play with the notions of originality, simulacra, etc. However it is interesting that image multiplication is in fact one of the most effective methods for solving information design problems. For a wide range [...] Read more – ‘Small Multiples – 16 are better than one’.
I am inviting you to the opening of the 22nd International Biennial of Industrial Design, taking place on Thursday 7th October 2010 at 7 p.m. at the Museum of Architecture and Design, Fužine Castle. Our project “Key Categories, Key Markets, Key Facts”, implemented for customer DrogaKolinska is exhibited in the Information Design section. The exhibition [...] Read more – ‘Invitation to BIO 22 Opening’.
iStudio presented its solutions at the Conference Innovative Business Approaches in the lecture Effective Management Information – the best practice of Slovenian and European companies. The mission of the conference Innovative Business Approaches is to present innovative business approaches and business solutions as the answers to present and future business needs of organisations for improvement [...] Read more – ‘iStudio at the Conference Innovative Business Approaches 2010’.
The work »Key Categories, Key Markets, Key Facts« from iStudio by Andrej Lapajne, will be exhibited at the 22nd international biennial of industrial design (BIO 22), taking place from 7th of October to 7th of November 2010 at Museum for Architecture and Design, Fužine Castle. The work was chosen in an extensive international competition of [...] Read more – ‘iStudio admitted to 22nd Biennial of Industrial Design’.
With Office 2007 Excel’s user interface does not support pattern fills any more. Which is not a terrible tragedy except perhaps from one thing: a well known trick for building the red-green chart does not work anymore. Since this chart is highly useful in reporting, I strived to find another trick that would do the [...] Read more – ‘World premiere of the Red-Green trick in Excel 2007’.
The selection of charts in management reporting depends on the message that we want to emphasize. Different charts are suitable for different situations. But if I would have to pick the most useful chart for most situations, I would decide for the combined Actual+Deviation chart. This chart displays actual values as well as deviations (actual [...] Read more – ‘Most useful chart in praxis?’.
According to the Data Ink theory (E. Tufte, 1983), the dot plot is actually the most optimal chart type. Since it uses minimal graphic representation to depict numbers, it has the largest data-ink ratio. The good side of these kind of visualizations is that they can depict a high volume of data and are still [...] Read more – ‘Dot plot maximizes data ink’.
We read the tables and see the charts. The picture (a chart or a diagram) enables a direct insight into the situation, while we have to read the table first and only then visualize its picture in our heads. It is hard to grasp a story that a sea of numbers is whispering to us [...] Read more – ‘Table or chart? Perhaps both…’.
Edward Tufte is a keen promoter of high resolution. Recently he published an interesting video demonstration about Apple’s iPhone. Also in this article Tufte repeats his fameous sentence: »To clarify add detail«. Do NOT reduce information. If the information seems chaotic, don’t start discarding it, fix the design instead. As expected the video demonstration entitled [...] Read more – ‘Tufte on iPhone resolution’.
Dot-plots are generally efficient charts because they have very high data-ink ratio. Let us see how we can condense two bar charts into a single dot-plot. Let’s explore the following case: we want to compare products by their sales values and profit (or loss). We will visualize to sales values with a simple bar chart: [...] Read more – ‘Condensing bar charts into dot-plot’.
Hans Rosling is the leader of the non-profit organization Gapminder, where you can find more excellent examples of social data presentation. Rosling wants to present information about global development, social differences etc. in a transparent way. In this he succeeded by using exclusively first-class data visualization which we can comprehend immediately and which – at [...] Read more – ‘Rosling’s bubbles’.
In his book Beautiful Evidence (2006) Edward Tufte suggests using small, high density charts that can be inserted directly into their text or number context. He called them sparklines. So what are sparklines, where can we use them and what are their limitations? Sparkline is a simply designed tiny chart with high information density, that [...] Read more – ‘Sparklines – embedded word-sized charts’.
Monitoring deviations (e.g. from plan or budget) is one of the key tasks of a controller or a business analyst. Controlling without some form of a plan or comparison to preset goals or benchmarks does not exist. This leads us to the following question: what is the optimal way of displaying deviations? We will call [...] Read more – ‘Deviation analysis: How to display deviations?’.
