Annotations and Comments: add context that speaks volumes

When delivering a dashboard to leadership or clients, your goal isn’t just to show numbers — it’s to tell a story, convey a message. With commentaries, you can guide viewers through key findings, comparisons, or calls to action, using visual pointers, highlighted text or similar methods.

Whether it's calling out “Record-high revenue” or “Cost spike due to external vendor,” you control the narrative. Specific comments make your dashboards more engaging and ensure your audience stays focused on what matters most.

Financial reports often include data that’s pending confirmation or might include temporary placeholders. With custom annotations, you can flag these directly in the table — using clear labels like “Pending Reconciliation” or “Forecasted Value.”

This helps ensure readers understand the limitations of the data at a glance, without cluttering the layout. Instead of lengthy footnotes, you create focused, in-context notes that travel with the data, minimizing misinterpretation and unnecessary follow-ups.

You're presenting a quarterly report, and one KPI shows a significant drop. Without context, this might cause confusion — or even alarm. With comments, you can add a clear note explaining that the drop was due to a known one-time event (e.g., system downtime or a policy change).

By adding the commentary directly on the chart, you ensure executives interpret the data correctly without having to refer to another document. It makes your reporting more transparent and proactive, especially in high-stakes environments.