BB0008 – The Importance Of Short Descriptions

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Hello and welcome to our latest blog post here on BIDA Brains.

I am pleased you have come back to see our latest blog post.

Thank you.

In this blog post we just want to make an observation because we tripped up on this just now working on our own dashboards.

When creating Dashboards the “Steven Few” way you cram as much information as you can onto the dashboard.

So use of ink and real estate is something to be careful about.

We were working on a dashboard where the City name for stores was appearing.

And, surprise, surprise, we forgot to create a short description for citys.

Luckily, the test data had some long city names in it and we noticed.

So we have created a city_sdesc to put city names on the dashboard.

The short story is this.

When putting text fields onto reports we long ago settled on 15 character max for text fields.

So you can see in the codes tables in our models that we have a “code” which is varchar 10.

Then we have a short description of the code which is varchar 15.

This varchar 15 is intended to be used in all places where a short description of the code is preferable to the 10 character code itself.

Then we have the long description which is varchar 255.

Lastly we put a help description on the codes tables which is also varchar 255.

These are particularly useful for tools like Business Objects which is where it came from.

Business Objects allows you to put a “help text” into a universe and it will pop up in Business Objects when the mouse is placed over the field.

But in doing our mapping for our prototype for retail outlets the name of the city for the outlet is in the table.

And we did not create a second field as city_sdesc to put onto the dashboard.

Lesson learned!

So we are just going to go back through and add short descriptions for all those things that might be put onto a dashboard as text.

I thought it would be polite and helpful to write a short blog post to mention this to our readers.

We hope you liked this blog post.

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to get in touch with us.

My details are on the contacts page.

Thank you very much for your time and attention.

We really appreciate you dropping by to read our blogs.

 

Best Regards.

Mihai Neacsu

Business Development Manager.

The BIDA Team.

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