Database Reference
In-Depth Information
FI g u R e 15 - 8
Color can be misleading
Ease of Development
rEPorTING TooL
PrEDEFINED CHArT TyPE
EASE oF DEVELoPMENT
Excel
Yes
PerformancePoint
Yes
Power View
No
Reporting Services
Yes
Silverlight/HTML5
N/A
INDICATorS
Indicators have been treated fairly extensively in Chapter 10, but they are in
many ways simply a subset of the conditional formatting. Although the color
is contained within a shape (which may have meaning), the color banding is
essentially the same concept as coding the entire cell in a color. The advan-
tage of an indicator is that it is a discrete item, and as such won't distract or
overlay the numeric value.
Commonly, indicators are limited to fewer numbers than conditional formatting,
so a problem with them both is rather more apparent: The numbers that are
being shown have been banded into ranges, and as such you lose precision
when displaying in this manner. As an example, let us consider the data set
showing average hours worked per year—in the conditional formatting cells
for 2011, it is very easy to rank the countries by color alone, but in the indica-
tor set it is much harder. This problem doesn't disappear with the conditional
formatting—look at cells H11 and C6 in Figure 15-9.
