The Tyranny of the Crosstab

A crusade against dashboards masquerading as data dumps.

The biggest lie in business intelligence?

"This dashboard is just for quick insights."

No, it's not. It's a graveyard for a 200-column export.

Somewhere between the 14th slicer and the 7th bookmark, we forgot why we were building dashboards in the first place.

What started as an interface for insight became a Power BI reenactment of Excel's greatest sins. Crosstabs, nested filters, drill-throughs so deep you forget what you were looking for in the first place.

This isn't analytics. It's window dressing for fear. Fear of choosing. Fear of being wrong.

So we build dashboards that give everyone everything, and no one anything they actually need.

A good dashboard should whisper the truth in under ten seconds.

Not drown you in a buffet of undecided data.

You want exports? Fine. Build a report. Link it from the dashboard.

Let the dashboard do its real job: make you feel something true, fast.