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July 18, 2003

21st-Century Green Bar

The legacy of green-bar reporting lives on, in both positive and negative ways

by Philip Russom

I occasionally have shell-shock flashbacks, recalling the machine-gun rat-a-tat of the line printer, the only type of printer I saw in the 1970s. Each one was encased in a soundproof cabinet because a few minutes of proximity would drive you deaf. Like a typewriter on steroids, a line printer could hammer out hundreds of characters a second onto continuous-feed paper. All that violence transferred a plague of numbers into interminable, user-unfriendly tables, spanning sheet after sheet of green-bar paper.

In case you were born after the invention of the laser printer, the name "green bar" comes from the paper used on line printers, which had light-green horizontal lines that helped readers follow long rows of numbers across the page.

"Green-bar reports" evolved in this primordial computing environment during the mid- to late 20th century. Although strongly influenced by the exigencies of the line printer and continuous-feed paper, vestigial traits of the green-bar report have been passed down to more modern styles of reports here in the 21st century. That can be a problem, as I'll explain later.

With tongue in cheek, I'd like to recount the rules of report design in the green-bar era:

When designing a report, include every number that any employee, consultant, partner, investor, or regulatory agent might ever need to see.
When a report consumer requests a new report, don't create a new report. Instead, find a report similar to the request, add the requested information to that report, and add the requestor's name to the report's distribution list.

The rules led to rather long reports, loaded with data few people needed, but it all made sense somehow. Back then, batch windows for running and printing reports were generous, and reports weren't run very frequently. A tiny percentage of businesspeople received reports, and most assumed that report consumption should be a communal activity. However, when applied to reporting practices today, these two rules have serious consequences, namely, numeric clutter and inactionable infoglut.

Numeric Clutter

When I look at green-bar reports, I see "numeric clutter." That's where great hosts of numbers are arranged in large tables, sometimes spanning several pages. As reports migrated through various delivery media (from printers to GUIs to browsers), they brought with them practices learned from decades of green-bar report design, especially numeric clutter. Reporting technology in the late 1990s took reports online, delivering them electronically in formats meant to be read on a PC screen — typically in a browser, proprietary report viewer, or Adobe Acrobat. Despite the online delivery, the practices of paper-based green bar linger on in the form of numeric clutter.

I see numeric clutter all the time in online reports. It's easy to spot when a PDF file contains 117 pages, each with a table of hundreds of numbers in 9-point type. Of course, the PDF isn't inherently to blame. A person creating a report can infuse numeric clutter into just about any report delivery medium or reporting style. For instance, I recently received an HTML-based report that forced me to scroll my browser down many screens to find the bottom of a table. Even worse, I've seen dashboard reports — which are supposed to be paragons of conciseness — with giant tables.

At this point, you may be wondering: "Shouldn't I be grateful for the wealth of information numeric clutter brings me as a report consumer?" No, because numeric clutter slows your productivity and seldom guides you to an obvious action.