Assessment can be wildly difficult. Leadership wants clean, easy to read visualizations which can take a lot of time to create, or re-create. Oftentimes the easiest data to collect doesn't mean very much and it can be onerous to pull together data from different sources. We use all kinds of methods to collect data for various purposes every day. Over the last few years, I've worked with my local team to find better, more efficient ways to collect and display our data, which I want to share with others in similar situations.In this presentation, I will share some painful lessons learned from struggling to collect, make sense of and create visualizations based on assessment data. We'll discuss how the format of the data limits what we can use it for, limitations of Excel, how to navigate problems with Excel on Apple computers and using platforms like Tableau.