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A scheduled report is judged on whether it was sent.
The person receiving it judges it on whether they read it. Those are two different tests, and almost every reporting setup in existence measures the first one. The job ran. The mail server accepted it. Nothing went red. By every signal available to the person who built it, the report succeeded.
This piece is about the gap between those two tests. It is not an argument about file formats, and it is not a claim that PDFs are bad. It is that a delivered report fails to be read in four distinct ways, only one of which is about the file, and the other three are usually invisible to whoever set it up.
There are no statistics in this article. There is a large amount of published guesswork about how many business reports go unread, none of which survives being checked, and adding to it would not help you. What follows is mechanisms instead, most of them documented by Sisense, all of them checkable against your own setup this afternoon.
Failure one: it arrives as a door
An attachment is not information. It is a decision to open something.
That decision gets made on a phone, between two meetings, by somebody who wanted one number. The number is on the other side of the door, and the door costs a download, an app switch and a pinch zoom. So the report that took the most work to produce gets the least attention in the company, and the reason is not that nobody cares.
What makes this one interesting is that it is the failure everybody notices and the only one anybody tries to fix. The usual response is to make the attachment better. Better layout, better chart, cleaner cover page. All of which improves the thing behind the door without touching the door.
Sisense will put the dashboard in the message body rather than attach it, and that is worth knowing because it is free and already installed. When you share a dashboard, in Sisense's own words, "you can configure Sisense to send periodic email notifications containing the dashboard inside the email's body or as a PDF attachment to your dashboard's Shared Users."1
This is our own interface, and it is here because it is the clearest picture of what the alternative to an attachment looks like. Each figure in the message is written once as a token, and replaced with that job's own live value when it runs.
The interesting question is not how to make people open the attachment. It is whether the thing they actually wanted could have been in the sentence they already read.
The check: open your own scheduled report on a phone, as a recipient, not as its author. Count the taps to the number.
Failure two: it arrives on time and it is wrong
This is the expensive one, and it is almost impossible to see.
A report scheduled for seven in the morning is a bet that the overnight load finished before seven. Most weeks you win. The weeks you lose look exactly like the weeks you win, because the report went out on time, formatted correctly, containing the data that existed at the moment it ran. Nothing failed. The schedule did precisely what it was told.
Somebody acts on it. Then on Thursday a number does not reconcile, and an afternoon disappears working backwards to a Tuesday morning that looked completely normal.
The mechanism is that a clock does not know anything about your data. It knows the time. The question a reporting job is really asking is "has the thing I am reporting on finished arriving", and a schedule answers a different question that is usually correlated with it and occasionally is not.
That is why event triggers exist, and why it is worth checking whether your reporting layer has them. A job that starts when the load finishes, or when an alert fires, is asking the right question. A job that starts at seven is asking a proxy for it.
The check: find the gap between when your load usually finishes and when your report usually sends. If it is under an hour, you are running closer to the edge than you think.
Failure three: it arrives incomplete, and nobody notices
Two of these are documented by Sisense, and both are design decisions with reasons behind them rather than faults. They matter here because neither one announces itself. The report arrives. It looks like a report. It is missing things.
Custom JavaScript does not survive an export. Sisense's documentation states that any custom JavaScript in widget or dashboard scripts "will not appear in Excel or CSV exports", because "exports always use the raw data and built-in formatting only".2 So if somebody scripted a widget into the thing your users actually want to look at, what leaves the building is the underlying data rather than what was built. On screen it is right. In the file it is raw.
A dashboard exported to PDF gives you the first page of each pivot. In Sisense's words: "By default, when you export a dashboard to PDF, only the first page of each pivot widget is exported."3 Exporting the pivot widget on its own behaves differently. The reason is that rendering a full table on export is expensive, which is fair, and Sisense sells a premium add on that removes the limit.4
There is a hard number attached to the widget level export as well: "You can export your Pivot table or table widget of up to 1,000 rows to PDF. Larger and more complex tables may fail."5
None of that is hidden. All of it is published. The problem is that the person who set the schedule up read the dashboard, not the documentation, and the recipient has no way to know that page two existed.
The check: open your last exported report next to the dashboard it came from and compare the bottom of the table. This takes ninety seconds and it is the single most useful thing in this article.
Failure four: it arrives for somebody who left
Recipient lists are written once, at the moment somebody asks for a report, and then almost never revisited.
So the report goes on arriving, accurately, on schedule, at an address belonging to somebody who changed job eighteen months ago. Or at a distribution list that three people have quietly filtered into an archive folder. Or at a customer who churned three months ago and is still receiving Monday's figures, which is the version of this that becomes a conversation.
This is not a technology failure at all. It is a lifecycle failure, and it persists because nobody owns the question. The report has an author, a schedule and a recipient list, and no owner for whether any of that is still true.
The honest position on fixing it is that visibility is the achievable part. A view of every reporting job in the system, with its owner and its target, filtered by people who have left, will tell you what is still going out on behalf of whom. Acting on what you find is still somebody's afternoon. We do not automate the cleanup and neither, as far as we can tell, does anybody else.
The check: ask your team how many scheduled reports are running inside your product right now. Then go and count. The gap between the guess and the number is the finding.
What this adds up to
Three of those four are not format problems.
The clock is a trigger problem. The truncation is a scope problem. The departed recipient is a lifecycle problem. Not one of them is improved by a better looking PDF, and all three are invisible from the sending end, which is the only end most people ever look at.
That is why "our reports go out fine" is such a common sentence and such a weak one. It describes the half of the system you can see. The half you cannot see is whether the numbers were ready, whether all of them arrived, and whether anybody at the other end is still there.
Five questions worth asking about your own reporting
Open one of your scheduled reports on a phone, as a recipient. How many taps to the number somebody actually wanted?
What is the gap between your load finishing and your report sending? Would you notice if the load ran late?
Does your reporting layer have a trigger that is not a clock? If a job can start from an event, the stale report problem mostly disappears.
Open your last export next to its dashboard. Same rows at the bottom? Same formatting?
How many scheduled reports are running right now, and who owns each one? If nobody can answer without asking an engineer, that is the answer.
If those five come back clean, your reporting is in better shape than most and this article was not for you. If two or three of them made you want to go and look at something, that is the useful outcome, and it costs nothing to check.
Related reading
If you are still choosing how to deliver a report at all, the companion piece walks through the five ways to do reporting in Sisense and which one fits which requirement. Ravid's broader piece on BI reporting in Sisense covers formats, delivery methods and use cases.
Sources
Every claim about Sisense on this page is linked to Sisense's own documentation or marketplace.
Want the ninety second check run on your own reporting?
read time
Why most scheduled reports never get read
Published by
Ravid Paldi
Founder & CEO
September 11, 2026
A delivered report fails to be read in four distinct ways. Only one of them is about the file. The other three are a trigger problem, a scope problem and a lifecycle problem, and all three are invisible from the sending end.
A scheduled report is judged on whether it was sent.
The person receiving it judges it on whether they read it. Those are two different tests, and almost every reporting setup in existence measures the first one. The job ran. The mail server accepted it. Nothing went red. By every signal available to the person who built it, the report succeeded.
This piece is about the gap between those two tests. It is not an argument about file formats, and it is not a claim that PDFs are bad. It is that a delivered report fails to be read in four distinct ways, only one of which is about the file, and the other three are usually invisible to whoever set it up.
There are no statistics in this article. There is a large amount of published guesswork about how many business reports go unread, none of which survives being checked, and adding to it would not help you. What follows is mechanisms instead, most of them documented by Sisense, all of them checkable against your own setup this afternoon.
Failure one: it arrives as a door
An attachment is not information. It is a decision to open something.
That decision gets made on a phone, between two meetings, by somebody who wanted one number. The number is on the other side of the door, and the door costs a download, an app switch and a pinch zoom. So the report that took the most work to produce gets the least attention in the company, and the reason is not that nobody cares.
What makes this one interesting is that it is the failure everybody notices and the only one anybody tries to fix. The usual response is to make the attachment better. Better layout, better chart, cleaner cover page. All of which improves the thing behind the door without touching the door.
Sisense will put the dashboard in the message body rather than attach it, and that is worth knowing because it is free and already installed. When you share a dashboard, in Sisense's own words, "you can configure Sisense to send periodic email notifications containing the dashboard inside the email's body or as a PDF attachment to your dashboard's Shared Users."1
This is our own interface, and it is here because it is the clearest picture of what the alternative to an attachment looks like. Each figure in the message is written once as a token, and replaced with that job's own live value when it runs.
The interesting question is not how to make people open the attachment. It is whether the thing they actually wanted could have been in the sentence they already read.
The check: open your own scheduled report on a phone, as a recipient, not as its author. Count the taps to the number.
Failure two: it arrives on time and it is wrong
This is the expensive one, and it is almost impossible to see.
A report scheduled for seven in the morning is a bet that the overnight load finished before seven. Most weeks you win. The weeks you lose look exactly like the weeks you win, because the report went out on time, formatted correctly, containing the data that existed at the moment it ran. Nothing failed. The schedule did precisely what it was told.
Somebody acts on it. Then on Thursday a number does not reconcile, and an afternoon disappears working backwards to a Tuesday morning that looked completely normal.
The mechanism is that a clock does not know anything about your data. It knows the time. The question a reporting job is really asking is "has the thing I am reporting on finished arriving", and a schedule answers a different question that is usually correlated with it and occasionally is not.
That is why event triggers exist, and why it is worth checking whether your reporting layer has them. A job that starts when the load finishes, or when an alert fires, is asking the right question. A job that starts at seven is asking a proxy for it.
The check: find the gap between when your load usually finishes and when your report usually sends. If it is under an hour, you are running closer to the edge than you think.
Failure three: it arrives incomplete, and nobody notices
Two of these are documented by Sisense, and both are design decisions with reasons behind them rather than faults. They matter here because neither one announces itself. The report arrives. It looks like a report. It is missing things.
Custom JavaScript does not survive an export. Sisense's documentation states that any custom JavaScript in widget or dashboard scripts "will not appear in Excel or CSV exports", because "exports always use the raw data and built-in formatting only".2 So if somebody scripted a widget into the thing your users actually want to look at, what leaves the building is the underlying data rather than what was built. On screen it is right. In the file it is raw.
A dashboard exported to PDF gives you the first page of each pivot. In Sisense's words: "By default, when you export a dashboard to PDF, only the first page of each pivot widget is exported."3 Exporting the pivot widget on its own behaves differently. The reason is that rendering a full table on export is expensive, which is fair, and Sisense sells a premium add on that removes the limit.4
There is a hard number attached to the widget level export as well: "You can export your Pivot table or table widget of up to 1,000 rows to PDF. Larger and more complex tables may fail."5
None of that is hidden. All of it is published. The problem is that the person who set the schedule up read the dashboard, not the documentation, and the recipient has no way to know that page two existed.
The check: open your last exported report next to the dashboard it came from and compare the bottom of the table. This takes ninety seconds and it is the single most useful thing in this article.
Failure four: it arrives for somebody who left
Recipient lists are written once, at the moment somebody asks for a report, and then almost never revisited.
So the report goes on arriving, accurately, on schedule, at an address belonging to somebody who changed job eighteen months ago. Or at a distribution list that three people have quietly filtered into an archive folder. Or at a customer who churned three months ago and is still receiving Monday's figures, which is the version of this that becomes a conversation.
This is not a technology failure at all. It is a lifecycle failure, and it persists because nobody owns the question. The report has an author, a schedule and a recipient list, and no owner for whether any of that is still true.
The honest position on fixing it is that visibility is the achievable part. A view of every reporting job in the system, with its owner and its target, filtered by people who have left, will tell you what is still going out on behalf of whom. Acting on what you find is still somebody's afternoon. We do not automate the cleanup and neither, as far as we can tell, does anybody else.
The check: ask your team how many scheduled reports are running inside your product right now. Then go and count. The gap between the guess and the number is the finding.
What this adds up to
Three of those four are not format problems.
The clock is a trigger problem. The truncation is a scope problem. The departed recipient is a lifecycle problem. Not one of them is improved by a better looking PDF, and all three are invisible from the sending end, which is the only end most people ever look at.
That is why "our reports go out fine" is such a common sentence and such a weak one. It describes the half of the system you can see. The half you cannot see is whether the numbers were ready, whether all of them arrived, and whether anybody at the other end is still there.
Five questions worth asking about your own reporting
Open one of your scheduled reports on a phone, as a recipient. How many taps to the number somebody actually wanted?
What is the gap between your load finishing and your report sending? Would you notice if the load ran late?
Does your reporting layer have a trigger that is not a clock? If a job can start from an event, the stale report problem mostly disappears.
Open your last export next to its dashboard. Same rows at the bottom? Same formatting?
How many scheduled reports are running right now, and who owns each one? If nobody can answer without asking an engineer, that is the answer.
If those five come back clean, your reporting is in better shape than most and this article was not for you. If two or three of them made you want to go and look at something, that is the useful outcome, and it costs nothing to check.
Related reading
If you are still choosing how to deliver a report at all, the companion piece walks through the five ways to do reporting in Sisense and which one fits which requirement. Ravid's broader piece on BI reporting in Sisense covers formats, delivery methods and use cases.
Sources
Every claim about Sisense on this page is linked to Sisense's own documentation or marketplace.
Sisense reporting options: five ways to deliver a report, and how to tell which one is yours
Export by hand, built-in sharing, Report Manager, Compose SDK, or a specialist add-on. What each one actually does, quoted from Sisense's own documentation, and the sentence about when it is the wrong choice.
Somebody has asked you for a report your dashboard cannot send.
Maybe it has to arrive every Monday at seven. Maybe it has to go to a client who will never have a login. Maybe it has to land in a storage bucket instead of an inbox, because somebody wrote a policy about attachments. Whatever the specific version is, you have discovered that building the dashboard and delivering what is on it are two different problems, and you are now looking at four or five ways of solving the second one.
The hard part is not that the options are complicated. It is that everybody who has written about them sells one of them.
We sell one of them too. We build add-ons for Sisense and one of them does reporting, and it is the last option on this page. What follows is the five real options, what each is genuinely good at, and the sentence about when it is the wrong choice. For a lot of readers the right answer is option two or option three, and where that is true this page says so.
Read down until a row describes your requirement. The first one that does is your answer.
Option 1: Export it by hand
This goes first because it is what most people are actually doing, and a guide that pretends otherwise is not describing your company.
Somebody opens the dashboard, sets the filters, exports, renames the file and sends it. It works. It is free. It requires no procurement conversation, no security review and no ticket. For a report that is genuinely occasional, it is the correct answer and there is no cleverness that beats it.
It stops being the correct answer at the point where it becomes a recurring commitment. Not because it is inefficient, but because it is invisible. Manual reporting never appears on a roadmap, in a job description or in a capacity plan. It appears in the month the person doing it is on leave and three customers do not get their numbers.
When it is wrong: the moment somebody's calendar has a recurring entry for it.
Option 2: Sisense's built-in dashboard sharing
Sisense ships scheduled delivery in the base platform, and it is worth knowing exactly how far that goes, because this is the option people most often over-estimate and under-estimate in the same conversation.
What you get without buying anything else is email. In Sisense's own words, when you share a dashboard "you can configure Sisense to send periodic email notifications containing the dashboard inside the email's body or as a PDF attachment to your dashboard's Shared Users."1 That is a real capability, and for a great many reporting requirements it is the whole answer.
Two things it does not try to be. It is not delivery to a file destination, so if your requirement is a bucket or an SFTP server rather than an inbox, this is not the option that does it. And it goes to your dashboard's shared users, which means the recipient is somebody who exists in Sisense.
Sisense also has documented multitenancy of its own,2 and if you have been carrying an assumption that the platform cannot do that, drop it. A good part of what circulates as a reporting gap in this ecosystem is somebody describing a version of the product that predates the fix.
When it is right, and it often is: the recipients have logins, email is an acceptable destination, and what you need is the dashboard rather than a shaped document. Nothing further down this page is better than free and already installed.
When it is wrong: when the destination is not an inbox, when the recipient is not a Sisense user, when you need the shape of what gets delivered rather than the delivery itself, or when the trigger is not a time.
Three questions separate the five faster than any feature list. Options one to four are documented by Sisense; option five is ours.
Option 3: Sisense's own Report Manager
Sisense sells a reporting product of its own, and if the built-in sharing stops short of what you were asked for, this is the next thing to look at rather than the last.
Be clear about what it costs you. It is "a Sisense certified add-on", which means it "comes installed together with Sisense and you do not need to perform any separate download or installation. However, it is a premium add-on and is only available if you have purchased a license."3 It sits on the Grow and Enterprise tiers.3 So the question is not whether to install it. It is whether you are on a tier that includes it, or close enough that the upgrade is a live conversation.
What it adds over option two is the part worth knowing. Advanced schedules, because "Sisense Admins can set up advanced schedules including custom end dates, as well as hourly, weekly, and monthly reporting options".3 And a file destination, because when SFTP is enabled "reports are archived via SFTP to a server designated on a per report basis".3 That is the capability option two does not have, and it is usually what triggers this whole search.
It also runs per tenant. "Report Manager is available to all organization tenants, so each tenant can schedule and send reports independently, without relying on the system tenant for configuration",4 and it is not admin-only: "the Report Manager allows users with Viewer (consumer) roles to access the Report Manager and schedule reports for themselves and other users."4 If you are an embedded product team who assumed self-service scheduling was something you would have to build, check this first.
And it is actively developed, which a lot of comparison writing in this ecosystem quietly assumes is not the case. In release 2026.1.1, "in multitenant systems, all tenants can now schedule reports using Report Manager".5 In 2026.1.2 its APIs "have been certified and standardized to meet REST API standards and facilitate custom UI development", and two scheduling behaviours were fixed: reports that continued for one day past a configured end date, and reports that ignored dashboard and widget filters set at different date granularities.6 If you evaluated it before those landed, you evaluated a different product.
If you are on the tier, start here. Buying more of the platform you already run is the lowest friction thing on this page after option two, and platform-native features do not have to be re-integrated after an upgrade. If you already own it and are still reading, the five questions at the foot of this page are the fastest way to find out whether your remaining requirement is a real gap or a setting you have not found yet.
When it is wrong: when the tier economics do not work for you, or when the requirement is specific enough that a general product does not reach it.
Three limits worth knowing before you choose, whichever option you pick
These are published by Sisense in its own documentation. They are not gotchas. They are design decisions with reasons behind them, and knowing them before you choose is worth more than any comparison table, because they decide which of the five options below will actually satisfy the request you were given.
Custom JavaScript does not survive an export. Sisense's documentation states that any custom JavaScript in widget or dashboard scripts "will not appear in Excel or CSV exports", because "exports always use the raw data and built-in formatting only".7 If you have scripted a widget into the thing your users actually want to see, what leaves the building is the underlying data.
A dashboard exported to PDF gives you the first page of each pivot. In Sisense's words: "By default, when you export a dashboard to PDF, only the first page of each pivot widget is exported."8 Exporting the pivot widget on its own behaves differently. The limit exists because rendering a full table on export is expensive, which is a fair reason, and Sisense sells a premium add-on that removes it.9
Some export behaviour is add-on territory rather than base platform. Sisense's own Export Modifications add-on, which is premium, "also enables exporting to Excel for table and table with aggregation widgets" alongside its styling features.10 Whatever you choose, check which side of that line your widgets sit on before you promise anybody a file.
None of these three make Sisense a weaker platform. Every mature reporting stack has an equivalent list, and the useful thing about this one is that it is published rather than discovered.
Option 4: Build it yourself on Compose SDK and the API
Compose SDK is where a lot of new Sisense work starts, so this is the option most likely to be mis-scoped. Here is the useful fact.
Widgets rendered in Compose SDK Mode "can be exported to Excel directly from the dashboard".11 That is what it includes. It does not include scheduling, it does not include email delivery, and it does not include PDF. None of that is a criticism of the SDK, which is a component library rather than a reporting product. It does mean that "we will just build reporting on the SDK" is a larger sentence than it sounds. A scheduler is not the hard part. The hard part is retries, credentials, per-tenant configuration, the interface somebody uses to set a job up, and the fact that you now own all of it forever.
If you have the engineering capacity and the requirement is genuinely specific to your product, this is a legitimate and sometimes the only answer. Go in knowing you have added a reporting product to your own roadmap, maintained by people whose job was supposed to be building something else.
There is a middle path here that gets missed, and it is the most useful thing on this page for a team that has already decided to build. Sisense certified the Report Manager APIs to REST standards specifically to "facilitate custom UI development".6 You can put your own interface, in your own product, on top of an engine somebody else maintains. You get the control you wanted over what your users see, and you do not inherit the scheduler, the retries and the credential handling. For most teams reaching for option four, that trade is better than the one they were about to make.
When it is wrong: when the honest reason for choosing it is that it looked like a week of work.
Option 5: A specialist add-on
This is us, and it is the shortest section on this page for the same reason it is the last one: if options one to four covered your requirement, you do not need it.
Specialist add-ons exist for the gap between what a platform delivers and what a particular product needs. In reporting, four things tend to justify one.
Live values inside the message. Measure and dimension values printed into the subject line, the body and the file name, resolved against the job's own filters at the moment it runs, so the person who only needed one number never opens anything.
A trigger that is not a clock. A job that starts from an inbound call or an alert rather than a schedule, so the report follows the data load instead of guessing when it finished.
A file destination with no size ceiling on that route. Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, FTP and SFTP, with a link in the email instead of an attachment, and several CSVs arriving as one zip.
Documents that survive the export. A pivot or table that comes out whole rather than stopping where the first page stopped. A table with its own typography for the page, set separately from the one on screen. A layout whose width is chosen by paper size rather than by pixels. These are capabilities of the Expandable Pivot and Advanced Table widgets rather than of the reporting engine, and that distinction is worth holding onto when anybody sells you a bundle.
For teams building on top of it rather than using it, it deploys inside your own estate and carries a secured API for administrative operations, with the same interface available as a composed React component inside a Compose SDK application. The detail is on the Report Manager page.
What we are building now, because it may change which option is yours: delivery into Slack and into an API call carrying the payload, so a downstream system can act on a report rather than a person reading it; conversational control through MCP, so changing a reporting job is something you ask your own AI assistant to do; and a reporting job defined once and run repeatedly across different recipient lists and filter selections. That last one does not exist yet, and the thing that does exist today is break-by, which produces one document per value of a dimension and delivers the set together. Those are different, and the difference matters if it is what you were asked for.
We have worked on Sisense and nothing else for ten years, across more than 150 Sisense customers, as a Gold Certified partner, and it runs in production inside multiple enterprise organisations today.
Which one is yours
Answer these five and the option usually picks itself.
How often does this report have to go out? Never on a schedule means option one, and stop reading.
Is the destination an inbox? If yes, and your recipients have Sisense logins, option two may already cover you and it costs nothing.
What tier are you on? If Report Manager is included, or the upgrade is already on the table, option three is the shortest path to a file destination and a real schedule.
Is the trigger a time, or an event? If a clock is genuinely the right trigger, most options work. If the report should follow the data, that narrows it fast.
Does the recipient need the number, or the document? This is the question that decides between delivery and presentation, and it is the one most requirements skip.
Worth screenshotting before your next reporting conversation.
If you answered your way to option two or option three, that is a correct outcome for this page, and we would rather you got there here than three months into an evaluation.
Related reading
Ravid's broader piece on BI reporting in Sisense covers formats, delivery methods and use cases. If you have already chosen and want the mechanics, the step-by-step scheduling guide walks through setting a job up, and this walkthrough shows how customers configured theirs.
Sources
Every claim about Sisense on this page is linked to Sisense's own documentation or marketplace.
Ever wondered why some charts work better than others in showing data? It's crucial to pick the right one, or your dashboard might confuse people instead of helping them. Sisense gives you lots of chart options, but knowing which to use can be tricky. Sometimes the built-in options might not cover all your needs. No worries! That's where this guide comes in. We'll show you some cool charts and explain when to use them. And if you find yourself needing more, we've got your back with our Paldi Solutions plugins.
We're excited to introduce Paldi's Advanced Visualization Kit, which contains a variety of interesting and useful visualizations that can elevate your dashboard to another level. Explore these advanced options to add depth and richness to your data representation, ensuring your Sisense dashboards are both visually compelling and highly informative.
Ready to dive in and make your data tell a story? Let's get started!
Exploring Advanced Visualizations: Innovative Types and Practical Applications
This part is all about checking out different ways to show your data. Think of it like finding the perfect picture for your numbers. Each type of chart is like a superhero with its own superpowers. We'll help you understand when to use them and how they make your dashboard more interesting. Whether it's simple pie charts or fancy drill treemaps, we've got all the cool stuff for you.
Sankey Diagram
The Sankey Diagram is a versatile and impactful data visualization tool designed to illustrate the flow of resources, energy, or information within a system. It uses cool interconnected pathways to draw out the flow and transformation of stuff. Imagine lines of different thickness showing how much of something is going where. It's like magic for understanding complex stuff! People in engineering, environmental science, and process optimization love using it because it helps find problems, and spots where things gather, and makes decisions smarter. It's basically a map that makes tricky things easy to understand!
Multi-Node Sankey Diagram
A Multi-Node Sankey Diagram is an extension or variation of the traditional Sankey diagram, specifically designed to represent complex systems with multiple nodes or stages. In a standard Sankey diagram, you typically visualize the flow of resources, energy, or information from one source to one destination. However, in a Multi-Node Sankey Diagram, the complexity increases as it accommodates multiple intermediate nodes or stages in the flow.
Imagine you're analyzing the user journey on an e-commerce website, and you want to understand the flow of visitors from landing on the homepage to completing a purchase. In this scenario, a Sankey diagram proves to be an invaluable tool. The diagram visually maps out the sequential steps users take, from the homepage through various pages such as product listings, cart, and finally, the checkout page. The width of the arrows in the Sankey diagram represents the volume of users at each stage, allowing you to pinpoint drop-off points and identify areas for optimization. It provides a clear and intuitive visualization of the user flow, making it easier to optimize the website's design and user experience for increased conversion rates.
Other Examples of Application
Energy Flow Analysis - Visualize the flow of energy within a system.
Material or Resource Flow - Visualizes the flow of materials or resources through various stages of production.
Project Management - Illustrates the progression of tasks and resources in project management.
Financial Budgeting and Expenditure - To represent budget allocations, expenses, and revenue streams.
Additionally, for users of Sisense, we at Paldi have an excellent plugin called Advanced Sankey Diagram. This plugin enhances the capabilities of Sisense by supporting multilevel Sankey Diagrams with a multitude of features, providing users with a robust tool for exploring and visualizing dependencies within their data.
Chord Dependency Diagram
The Chord Dependency Diagram is a visual representation that effectively displays relationships and connections between different entities or elements in a dataset. Its distinctive circular design features "chords" that connect related data points, making it easy to identify dependencies and correlations. This diagram is particularly useful for revealing intricate patterns and dependencies within complex datasets, providing a clear and intuitive way to grasp the interconnections between various components.
In the context of international trade between countries, a Chord Dependency Diagram proves to be an invaluable tool for visualizing and understanding the complex network of dependencies. Each node in the diagram represents a specific country, and the chords connecting them illustrate the trade relationships and dependencies between nations. The width of the chords reflects the volume or value of goods and services exchanged. This visualization allows policymakers, economists, and analysts to identify key trading partners, analyze the interdependencies between countries, and assess the potential impact of disruptions on the global supply chain.
Other Examples of Application
Network Analysis - Visualizing and understanding complex relationships within network structures.
Supply Chain Optimization - Visualizes dependencies and connections within a supply chain.
Financial Transaction Networks - Represent relationships between different financial entities, such as banks, investment funds, or transactions.
Logistics and Transportation - Showcase dependencies between different routes, modes of transportation, and supply chain components.
For Sisense users seeking to harness the full potential of this visualization, Paldi Solutions introduces an exceptional plugin: the Advanced Chord Dependency Diagram. This plugin simplifies the widget creation process, allowing users to seamlessly incorporate this powerful visualization into their Sisense dashboards.
Pie Chart
A Pie Chart is like a visual pizza, dividing information into slices to show the proportion of different categories in relation to the whole. It's perfect for quickly understanding the distribution of data.
Imagine you're managing a marketing campaign with multiple channels contributing to overall success. In this scenario, a pie chart proves invaluable for illustrating the distribution of the campaign's budget across different channels. Each slice of the pie represents a specific channel, displaying the proportion of the total budget allocated to that particular avenue. This visual representation provides an instant and clear understanding of where the majority of resources are directed and allows for quick comparisons between channels. For instance, you can easily discern whether social media, email marketing, or other channels are receiving a larger or smaller share of the budget.
Pie-of-Pie Chart
The purpose of a Pie-of-Pie chart is to provide a more detailed breakdown of each slice that might be smaller or less significant in the overall dataset. It allows for a closer examination of particular elements within the larger context, making it easier to emphasize and understand details that might be overshadowed in the main chart. This type of chart is often used when there are one or more smaller data points that warrant attention or when a more granular view is needed for specific categories.
Consider a sales analysis scenario where you need to delve into the product categories contributing the most to overall revenue. A pie-of-pie chart becomes a valuable tool in this context. The main pie chart provides a high-level overview of total sales, with each slice representing a product category. However, to add granularity, the pie-of-pie chart is employed. The secondary pie chart breaks down the sales of the categories into subcategories. This visualization allows stakeholders to not only identify the dominant product category but also understand the composition of that category in terms of specific subcategories.
Other Examples of Application
Market Share - Display the market share of various competitors within an industry.
Revenue Distribution - Illustrate the proportion of revenue generated by different business units or product lines.
Sales by Region - Break down sales figures for a particular region into smaller pies to identify the most lucrative sub-regions.
Product Contribution - Highlight the specific products or services that contribute significantly to the revenue within a broader product category.
Paldi's Advanced Pie Chart serves as an excellent choice for Sisense dashboard developers, effortlessly allowing the creation of both standard pie charts and pie-of-pie charts. It offers extensive customization options, providing flexibility in tailoring the visual representation to specific preferences and requirements.
Treemaps
A Treemap is like a colorful puzzle, showing different categories as rectangles with sizes based on their values. It's great for understanding how things are divided up in a hierarchy. For instance, in a money tracker, it can display how your spending is split between different expense categories.
Imagine managing a diverse portfolio of projects within an organization, each with multiple subcategories and associated budgets. In such a scenario, a Treemap becomes a powerful visualization tool. The Treemap allows you to represent the entire project portfolio hierarchically, with each larger rectangle representing a main project and subdivided into smaller rectangles representing subcategories or specific aspects of the project. The size of each rectangle corresponds to the budget allocated to that project or subcategory. This visual representation provides an intuitive and space-efficient way to convey the distribution of resources across the project portfolio.
Drill-Down Treemap
Now, imagine a Drill-Down Treemap as a cool way to zoom into those rectangles. You can click on them to see more details, like going from continents to countries and then to specific cities in a map. This is super useful for exploring specific parts of the data puzzle, like checking sales performance in different regions or understanding the structure of a company from the big boss down to teams.
In the context of analyzing organizational expenses, a Drill-Down Treemap serves as a valuable asset. Imagine having a high-level overview of expenditure categories such as marketing, operations, and research. The Treemap allows you to visualize these categories with each block representing a major expense area. Now, introducing the Drill-Down functionality, you can seamlessly delve deeper into any specific category. For instance, clicking on the marketing block might reveal subcategories like digital advertising, events, and campaigns. Each subcategory is represented proportionally, offering a clear picture of the budget distribution within the broader marketing expense.
Other Examples of Application
Sales Analysis: Drill down into geographic sales data, starting from continents and moving to countries, regions, and even specific stores or branches.
Healthcare Analytics: Navigate through healthcare data, from general health statistics to specific conditions, treatment outcomes, and patient demographics.
Product Performance: Examine product sales within broader categories, providing insights into which products are contributing the most to overall revenue.
Financial Budgeting: Explore budget allocations by breaking down spending categories into subcategories, offering a detailed view of expenses.
The Advanced Drill Treemap plugin, included in Paldi's advanced visualization kit, provides both standard and drill treemaps, presenting a comprehensive array of options for users.
Venn Diagram
A Venn Diagram is a visual representation that illustrates the relationships between different sets of data. It consists of overlapping circles, where each circle represents a set, and the overlapping areas show the elements that are common to those sets. Venn Diagrams are widely used to showcase the similarities and differences between various groups or categories. They help visualize the intersection and distinct elements within datasets, making it easy to understand the relationships between different components. For example, in a business context, a Venn Diagram could be used to display the overlap between customers who purchased product A and those who purchased product B, revealing the shared customer base.
In the realm of market segmentation, a Venn Diagram proves to be an insightful tool for visualizing the overlap and distinctions between different target audience segments. Consider a scenario where a company offers a range of products appealing to various customer demographics. The Venn Diagram allows marketers to represent these demographic segments as circles, each circle indicating a unique customer group based on factors like age, preferences, or geographic location. The overlapping areas in the diagram highlight segments that share common characteristics, providing a visual representation of potential cross-selling opportunities or shared marketing strategies.
Other Examples of Application
Comparing Social Media Audiences: Visualize the overlap of audience interests between different social media platforms for targeted marketing.
Examining Technology Features: Compare the features of different technological devices, such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets.
Customer Behavior in Retail: Categorize customer behaviors in a retail setting, such as shopping online, in-store, or both.
Analyzing Project Team Skills: Identify the skills common among team members in a project, helping in resource allocation and task assignment.
Paldi's Adaptive Venn Diagram stands out as an excellent choice for Sisense developers, enabling the creation of visually striking and insightful Venn diagrams with ease.
Radial Histogram
A radial histogram, sometimes referred to as a polar histogram, is a type of histogram that displays the distribution of data in a circular arrangement. Unlike traditional histograms that use bars along a single axis, a radial histogram places bins or sectors around a central point, creating a circular or radial pattern.
In addition to the circular representation of data distribution, some advanced radial histograms go a step further by supporting more than one dimension to represent categories and their subcategories. This means that additional layers or rings can be used to convey additional dimensions of the data. This enhanced feature allows for a richer and more detailed representation of complex datasets, enabling the visualization of multiple aspects within each radial segment.
Imagine analyzing the distribution of sales performance across different regions throughout the year in a business report. A Radial Bar Histogram serves as a powerful visualization tool in this scenario. Each bar in the histogram represents a specific region, and the radial arrangement allows for an intuitive comparison of sales figures. The length of each bar corresponds to the sales volume, and the circular layout allows stakeholders to quickly identify regions with the highest and lowest sales. The radial aspect facilitates a visual exploration of regional trends and disparities, offering a unique perspective on the overall sales landscape. This type of visualization proves especially effective when you want to showcase variations in sales performance across multiple regions in a dynamic and visually engaging manner.
Other Examples of Application
Performance Comparison: Compare the performance of multiple entities across different categories, with each radial bar representing a performance metric.
Product Feature Comparison: Compare features or attributes of different products in a circular layout, making it easy to identify strengths and weaknesses.
Skill Proficiency: Illustrate the proficiency levels of individuals or teams across various skills in a radial arrangement.
Temperature Variation: Showcase temperature variations throughout a day or year, with each bar representing a specific time or month.
Paldi's Adaptive Radial Infographics is a preferred option for Sisense developers aiming to design impressive and advanced radial charts. This tool supports two dimensions and offers a variety of features, including built-in advanced tooltips, enhancing the charting capabilities for a visually compelling experience.
Combined Visualizations
Combining diverse chart types is a powerful strategy in data visualization, enhancing the ability to derive meaningful insights. The fusion of charts, such as Line Charts, Area Charts, Column Charts, and Bar Charts, provides a holistic view of data trends. Sisense facilitates this approach, offering built-in features that seamlessly combine two chart types. The interactive nature of these combined charts elevates the user experience, enabling dynamic exploration and analysis of complex datasets.
In the context of sales performance analysis, a Combined Chart Type proves highly effective for presenting both actual sales figures and target benchmarks. Imagine a scenario where a company sets quarterly sales targets for its sales teams. By combining a Line Chart to illustrate the actual sales performance over time with a Line or Bar representing the target values, stakeholders can easily compare achieved results against set goals. The Line Chart showcases the fluctuation in sales, while the Target Line or Bar provides a clear reference point for expected performance. This combination allows sales managers to assess team performance in relation to targets, identify trends, and make informed decisions on strategies for meeting or exceeding future sales goals.
Other Examples of Application
Financial Analysis: Integrate Area Charts to represent overall revenue trends with Column Charts for expense breakdowns, offering a consolidated financial overview.
Sales and Revenue Analysis: Display multiple sales indicators alongside line charts depicting revenue trends.
Employee Performance: Present employee performance metrics, integrating line charts to illustrate individual or team achievements over time.
Paldi introduces a game-changing visualization tool, the Indicator Card, which takes combined visualizations to the next level. This advanced plugin not only accommodates multiple indicators in a single widget but also seamlessly integrates line, bar, column, or area charts. Its high interactivity, coupled with features like drill-down capabilities and built-in additional tooltip information, enhances the richness of data representation.
Consider a scenario in project management where you need to present both key performance indicators (KPIs) and the corresponding project progress in a clear and concise manner. The Combined Chart Type, incorporating both an Indicator and Bar Chart, proves to be a powerful solution. The Indicator can represent critical metrics such as completion percentages, while the Bar Chart visualizes the actual progress in various project tasks or phases. This combination allows project managers and stakeholders to quickly assess not only the overall project health through KPIs but also the detailed progress in individual components.
Creating Powerful Dashboards
In today's data-driven world, businesses rely heavily on dashboards to monitor key metrics, track performance, and make informed decisions. However, not all dashboards are created equal. To truly harness the power of data visualization, it's essential to design dashboards with complementary visualizations that provide comprehensive insights at a glance.
Industry Dashboards: Blending Widgets for Optimal Insights
Let's delve into an example of an industry dashboard for a retail chain. Imagine a dashboard that tracks sales performance across different regions, product categories, and customer segments. To effectively convey this information, a combination of widgets works best:
Single Value Indicator: At the helm of our dashboard sits a single value indicator, proudly displaying the total sales revenue for the selected period. This simple yet impactful widget acts as the North Star, guiding users' attention to the primary metric driving business success.
Column Chart: A column chart displays sales figures for each product category, offering a quick comparison of performance. This visual is ideal for identifying top-selling categories and trends over time.
Line Chart: Pairing the column chart with a line chart showcasing sales trends over time adds depth to the analysis. It allows users to spot seasonal patterns, identify sales spikes, and evaluate overall growth trajectories.
Pie of Pie Chart: In a retail context, understanding the distribution of sales across different regions is crucial. A pie of pie chart provides a concise overview of sales distribution by region, with the main pie chart showing total sales by region and the secondary pie chart breaking down again by category.
Drill-Down Treemap: To dive deeper into sales performance within specific regions or product categories, a drill-down treemap offers an interactive solution. Users can navigate through hierarchical data structures, revealing insights at various levels of granularity.
Advanced Sankey Diagram: For analyzing the flow of sales from one stage to another, an advanced Sankey diagram is invaluable. It visualizes the path of sales conversion, highlighting bottlenecks, and opportunities for optimization within the sales funnel.
Radial Histogram: To explore the distribution of sales across different price ranges or customer demographics, a radial histogram offers a unique perspective. Its circular layout provides a visually engaging way to compare frequency distributions.
Enhancing Adoption with Advanced Visualizations
While traditional charts and graphs serve their purpose, incorporating advanced visualizations elevates the dashboard experience and drives higher adoption rates. Here's how:
Enhanced Interactivity: Advanced visualizations, such as Sankey diagrams and drill-down treemaps, offer interactive features that empower users to explore data dynamically. This hands-on approach fosters engagement and encourages users to delve deeper into the insights presented.
Storytelling Capabilities: Complex data relationships and trends are often easier to grasp with advanced visualizations like chord dependency diagrams. By telling a visual story, these diagrams simplify complex concepts, making them more accessible to a broader audience.
Visual Impact: Advanced visualizations add a visual flair to dashboards, capturing users' attention and making data more memorable. Whether it's the elegant flow of a Sankey diagram or the intricate connections depicted in a chord diagram, these visuals leave a lasting impression.
Comprehensive Insights: By combining multiple advanced visualizations within a single dashboard, users gain a holistic view of the data. Each visualization offers a unique perspective, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying trends and patterns.
In conclusion, creating powerful dashboards requires careful consideration of complementary visualizations that cater to users' analytical needs. By blending traditional charts with advanced visualizations, such as Sankey diagrams and chord dependency diagrams, businesses can unlock actionable insights and drive informed decision-making. With enhanced interactivity, storytelling capabilities, and visual impact, advanced visualizations pave the way for a more engaging and impactful dashboard experience.
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