Money and Tables

Who knew that simple things like interacting with a financial statement or dealing with a table of numbers could be such an adventure? RantWoman's takeaway from wrestling with the issue: there almost certainly are blind people who interact in different more high-powered levels than does RantWoman. However, a surprising percentage of the time, what turns out to be important has little to do with whatever RantWoman first identified such as the actual visual informaition presented.



A couple weeks ago, RantWoman was at a meeting where they were going over the organization's quarterly financial report. RantWoman has been hearing this organization's financial reports for years. Although the current treasurer does not make nearly as much use of demanding technical accounting terms like "peanut-buttering costs over a couple periods" as previous ones, the report does not change much.



RantWoman understands the basic issues. This time there also happened to be a fair number of people new to the report who were asking cogent questions. Further, the organization is prudently run and there are only a few lines of this particular report that have Big Questions attached to them so this time RantWoman did not even bother fishing out a magnifier to look at actual numbers. RantWoman did not even regret this decision a few days later when someone called RantWoman to talk about a matter involving her personally and the number in one of the lines. RantWoman still did not bother with a magnifier; she just asked her caller what the number was and the conversation proceeded accordingly.



RantWoman's other technique is overrated comment arose in connection with her public participation project. The last couple weeks, all the participants in the project have been going over some information that is just a lot of text in Word documents as well as some tables of numbers. RantWoman thinks she did a tolerable though not always superior job of absorbing the content of the texts, at least at the level needed for volunteer effort. RantWoman might have to reassess this if she were getting paid.



RantWoman also had to decide she would concentrate on parts of the picture where she has intimate on-the-ground knowledge and not stress out or even shut up and try to learn something about big sections of the project where she has negligible knowledge



Then it came time to read the tables, most of which were a number followed by a percentage. The numbers were more or less in descending order for each data group. The problem, after reading just a few lines from the tables was that the percentages were bogus in RantWoman's estimation because they were based on the wrong denominators. Okay, so RantWoman is spoiled by the visual ease of Excel pivot tables or things she knows code to write for other ways of doing easy slice and dice with data.