[jiggawatts]

Something that always annoyed me about numeric data like dollar amounts in tables is that visually the comparison between quantities is logarithmic instead of linear.

E.g.:

    Cost
    $1500
     $130
     $110
     $210

The text in the last three rows look 4/5ths the size of the text in the first row. However, even if summed, the last three costs add up to only 1/3rd of the top row! People visually see the number digits, which is roughly the same as Log 10.

I’ve so often had this issue that I started putting in-cell bar charts into every finance-related spreadsheet.

Otherwise meetings will get derailed debating the cost of something trivial that is totally irrelevant compared to the biggest absolute costs.

As a real example, I had many meetings spent debating a $15 monthly cost for server log collection in the cloud for a VM running a database engine that costs $15K monthly for the license alone.