[Sigia-l] Displaying Large Tables

[Jane.Gray at cumis.com]

>>The number of columns is potentially large, thus would cause the user to
scroll left and >>right to read them all.

>>Is there a better way of displaying this information? Most of it is data
by hour for a >>particular location (where the locations are listed along
the Y axis and time is along the >>X axis).

Just finished a goal setting application for a financial institution and we
were not able to come up with a different way.  We ended up having the LH
side of the display stationary with the overall goals and variances by
branch showing in a table .  In the RH side we have a matching table
showing the product goal totals by branch - they do not all fit on one
screen so the user must scroll from left to right to see and enter the
product totals.  As the amounts are entered in the RH side of the display,
the LH variance adjust so the user can see how close they are to matching
the original goal set.  It may depend on the requirements - our users
strongly favoured staying on the one page and just scrolling across the one
table as opposed to paging back and forth.  We really struggled with this
design as we were not convinced that it would be usable, however feedback
has been extremely positive.  To qualify that though, I would say that the
application is not intended for daily use - more like once a quarter.