

It is less common with Visual Reporting tools like Tableau and Qlikview, in part because these tools are designed to specifically support data exploration and interaction with click and drill-through capabilities. Selective attention on exception queries seems to happen due to the strengths of traditional analytics tools like Microsoft Excel and general purpose tools like CaseWare IDEA or ACL. If you've not seen the selective attention (aka Gorilla and Basketball) videos from Daniel Simons, here's a fun link.

This limits the effectiveness of their analysis, because they are searching for something specific and can overlook other conditions or anomalies in their data. This week's 3rd tip for advancing with audit and compliance analytics is to "Understand Your Data, and Explore it Fully Before Developing Exception Queries." One common mistake that we see audit and compliance professionals make with data analytics is that they sometimes dive right into searching for transaction exceptions before exploring their data fully.
