General advice on how to emphasize variances

[nenadvukovic]

Dear Community members,

This time I am not interested in a particular "how to do it in Qlik View/Sense" but rather a general best rule to emphasize/draw  attention/"mark it in red" for variances between two numbers, like EBIT, etc. I believe that relative differences are more meaningful than absolute ones.

We have two options:

1. If you mark any negative change as red, and any positive as green, you still have to see which one(s) represent a truly material variance. So, you need to process it more and this takes time.

2. If you use a percentage increase of the change to mark it red/green (like if the change is more than +/- 5% then place a color on it, otherwise leave it as it is) you get a relatively more correct outliers. Do you? I mean, when you have dimensions with big and small absolute numbers marking a relative change as red may emphasize a small absolute change for such dimension in the comparison with a big dimension, where a smaller relative change is more significant from the absolute point of view..

Is there a better way?

Thank you for sharing your experience and knowledge.

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to all.

[Gysbert_Wassenaar]

That's a good question. If big relative changes are not significant because they concern changes in small values then perhaps you need to use two conditions, i.e. both absolute size and relative change. It depends on the situation... as always :-). Context is very important, so you can't blindly follow guidelines as if they're absolutes.

[#3]

In the past, I have seen people use both numbers and mini charts.  You can also vary the color based on the variance amount by having an expression that sets the color based on the amount of the variance.  This would tell you for example that orange was negative but as severe as a variance in red, for example (use different shades of green going in a positive direction)

you can also calcualted the variance as a percent and use gauge charts

below is using a linera gauge in the expression

[nenadvukovic]

Thanks, but the way of showing it does not address the concern.

[nenadvukovic]

You are right Gysbert. It's a tricky one as you also need to address the scales used and currency translations, etc. I've come to a conclusion, for now, to use different percentages of decrease/increase based on the base amount. E.g. 3% for 100+M, 10% for 10-99M and 15% for 1 - 9M. So, a few if() statements which should not be noticeable from the response point of view, especially if used on dashboards where data are accumulated in the script upfront.