Stop Sending Me Screenshots of Dashboards: I Need the Raw Export

The Postcard from Nowhere

You have seen it. The slide deck lands in your inbox. Slide 4: A beautiful, glossy screenshot of a dashboard. There is a speedometer gauge in the green zone. There is a 3D pie chart (a crime against intelligence) showing market share. There is a smooth line chart going up and to the right.

Everyone nods. “Good quarter,” they say.

I look at this slide, and I feel my pulse rise. Not because I am excited, but because I am suspicious. This screenshot is a postcard. It says, “Wish you were here! Everything is beautiful!” But it does not show us the alleyway behind the hotel where the garbage is piling up.

A screenshot is a claim without evidence. It is a locked door.

The Distortion: Dashboard tools are designed to aggregate. To aggregate is to hide. They take a thousand screaming customer complaints and average them into a “4.2 Star Rating.” They take a week of zero sales and a week of double sales and smooth them into a “Steady Growth Trend.” They are polite. They are diplomatic. They are lying to us.

The Signal: Truth is granular. Truth lives in the rows, not the summary. The signal is weak, and the dashboard’s primary job is to drown it out with bright colors and rounded corners.

The Five Quiet Failures

When I demand the raw export—the messy, ugly CSV that generated that pretty picture—I usually find one of these five things within three minutes:

1. The Date Range Trick: The screenshot says “Q3 Growth,” but the filter excluded the first week of July because “migration issues.”
2. The Zombie Accounts: The “Active Users” count includes 400 accounts that haven’t logged in since 2022 but were never marked ‘churned’ in the database.
3. The Currency Mixer: The “Total Revenue” column sums USD, EUR, and GBP as if they are all the same number. (I have seen this erase millions in value).
4. The Null Void: The dashboard treats blank cells as zeros. They are not zeros. They are missing data.
5. The Cap: The chart cuts off the Y-axis to make a 2% growth look like a rocket ship launch.

[TO EDITOR: Create a visual comparison. Image A: A “Gauge” chart pointing to Green/100%. Image B: A snippet of the data table underneath showing rows with ‘Error’, ‘Null’, and ‘Test_User’. Caption: “The Gauge is Green. The Data is Rotting.”]

Bring Truth Back

I am not saying we burn all dashboards. I am saying we treat them as leads, not verdicts.

When you see a chart that looks too perfect, do not applaud. Point to the data point that defies the trend and ask, “What is that?” If the presenter cannot click on it and show you the underlying transaction, the meeting is over.

We must stop accepting the postcard. We must demand to see the street view.

Next time someone sends you a screenshot, ask for the source file. Watch their face. If they panic, you know you are onto something. If they hand it over, open it. Ignore the columns they highlighted. Look for the blanks. Look for the outliers.

The dashboard tries to sell you a story. The raw export tells you the history.

FAQs

But dashboards save time for executives!

They save time only if the data is correct. If the data is wrong, they accelerate the speed at which you make a bad decision.

Isn't raw data too overwhelming?

It is only overwhelming if you do not know what you are looking for. We look for the voids and the spikes.

What is the worst offender in dashboards?

The Gauge Chart. It takes up half the screen to tell you one number, and it usually lacks context.