A dashboard is *not* a replacement for a report. Trying to sell it as such will fail, and rightly so.

If your managers are used to getting a monthly report with lots of detail available to them they will rebel if you try to give them only a summary with a few super-dense microcharts and RAG indicators.
Try taking away the Financial Times (or WSJ) when it arrives every day at the office, cut out only the headlines and paste them onto a sheet of card. Give this to the CFO instead of the whole newspaper and tell him the summary is much more powerful. Now go pack your desk.

If your management have poor reports, introduce improvements to those reports. Add summary information (in graphics form and/or aggregated summaries). Add trend information (again, figures may be appropriate at first to show things like yoy variance, sparklines might add more detail later). But don’t take away the detail the manager wants to see.
Introduce dashboards as an *addition* to weekly/monthly reports. Show how you can provide important summary information and draw attention to areas that need to be addressed in a much more agile, up-to-the-minute (or at least the day) fashion. Show that this can enable the business to react to changes or emerging trends as they happen, rather than having a post-mortem at the monthly meeting about what went wrong.
If you have the technology or skills, enable the manager to get behind the dashboard data to drill down into detail where it is needed. This way they can start to see the connection between the summarised version and the “old” way, and ease themselves into the change.
While some of the visualisations used in dashboards may be useful in the context of a report, the two deliverables have different purposes, and you need to always keep in mind what the consumer of the data wants to see, and what they will do with the data and their interpretation of it.

Changes in the work process often are not in this category.

Asking someone to look at data in a different manner or from a different perspective can be threatening to the ego and challenge an individual cognitively.

More interesting though is the observation that the individual may find his prior analyses may just be plain wrong. They start to question prior data was interpreted either incorrectly or not with the comprehension that was needed to make the decisions that were made.

Uh Oh!

My trouble: people are using the deliverable as eye candy, not as a tool as it was intended to be.

I’m not so sure about that. In my opinion being an Excel expert, along with other qualities, can help you move up the food chain. Being able to quickly massage data into meaningful reports and dashboards is a very valuable asset for a company. Now that Microsoft is marketing Excel as a BI reporting tool (with PowerPivot) chances are Excel skills will become even more valuable.

‘Getting people away from tables’ should never be a goal in and of itself. Once you fall into this way of thinking you’ve lost sight of the actual business needs that want addressing. Also, don’t underestimate the power of the common table to express information in a comprehensive and comprehensible manner.

Your point about decimal points resonates with a post I wrote a while back (http://www.datadrivenconsulting.com/2010/05/using-charts-to-to-emphasize-results-sp-vs-life-policy/) where in an advertisement, S&P had used excessive decimal points on one piece of data to emphasize its seriousness. Obviously data is much more important if it’s incredibly precise…. this is the kind of challenge that we face.

I use Excel Dashboards as a prototype tool to change the perception that common users have when they approach to spreadsheets.

I have examples of that into my blog

The Pygmalion Syndrome says us that is needed a receptive adaptation to accomodate to changes and that is more dificult for all business managers and mainly to CEOs.