First of all, the title is intended to be

a little tongue-in-cheek – just a little bit.  I’ll explain.  Last week

while I was teaching a class on report design, one of the students asked “what is

the definitive, industry-standard guide for proper dashboard & KPI design?” 

I thought, well, I know several authors in the industry who have written about this

topic but I wouldn’t consider any one of them to be THE definitive guide.  Sure,

Edward Tufte has written at least seven volumes about how information has been visualized

– good and bad – through ages past and on into the modern business world.  I’m

a firm believer that if it hasn’t been done – and that it needs to be done – that

I can do it... in a series of articles about effective report UI visuals, how to choose

the best presentation option for a given scenario.  This first post will just

be a simple starting point to frame the discussion and set the stage.

I will begin by reviewing these books and discuss the pros, cons and the applicability

to the subject of dashboard and KPI design using the Microsoft product stack.

• Edward Tufte – The Visual Display of Quantitative

  Information

• “ – Envisioning Information

• “ – Visual Explanations

• Stephen Few – Information Dashboard Design

  - Effective Visual Communication of data O’Reilly

• Nils Rasmussen – Business Dashboards: A Visual

  Catalog for Design and Deployment

• Ken Withee – Microsoft Business Intelligence

  for Dummies (Wiley)

• Ron Person – Balanced Scorecards & Operational

  Dashboard with Excel (Wiley)

• Turley/Bruckner – SSRS Recipes: for Designing

  Expert Reports. (Wrox)

• SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence 24-hour

  Trainer

• Knight’s Microsoft Business Intelligence 

  24-hour Trainer

Weblog by Paul Turley and SQL Server BI Blog.