Doc or XLS

In a conversation yesterday I heard someone describe how a series of data points were stored in a Word document. At the time, I wondered why data points weren’t being put into a spreadsheet. Then I mused on how the medium of how reports were stored could affect the perception of the data in the reports. A few thoughts:

1 in documents, the connotation is a narrative, or storytelling, or literature. Documents are idea buckets. This can create a persuasion sensation that is less found in spreadsheets (or PPTs) which are more “here’s the data, make of it what you will.”

2 Spreadsheets compartmentalize (rows, columns, cells) while documents store prose that flows from one thing to another. You can lose some of the nuance and gradients between two cells, but the flow of a document is in one direction and it’s hard to change directions (“sort the cells” = change the flow).

3 “to a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” doc or xls, the medium can determine how we say what we say, and thus what is said. It can restrict/guide our thinking patterns - and also the thinking of the person receiving it.

4 Since a document is generally a flow process - one starts at the beginning and moves to the end - where a spreadsheet is not, people can jump around and may ask more questions of a spreadsheet (“what does this mean”) than a document. If we want someone to grapple with data and ask questions, a spreadsheet may be the best approach. If we want someone to consider an argument flow and a conclusion, a document may be better.

5 spreadsheets can convey the idea of transforming humans into data points, and be perceived as dehumanizing. “How do humanize the data” was one question I heard at a talk last night.

6 spreadsheets can be perceived as “credibility stamps” but the stories in documents are the images of the future, the “selling points,” the “persuaders,” the “big idea.”

7 confirmation bias may be more prominent in documents with the flow of narrative. Anchoring biases may be found in spreadsheets, where the first numbers seen influence how we evaluate later numbers.