Writers block...

Hi Geert! I guess it depends on what you want folks to get out of it. Across the top, its a role, yes? What if you asked a person to select their role and displayed (or highlighted) the aspects that are important to their role. You might do this with a drop down or even just setting up a series of buttons along the left side of the page:

Shippers 

& Packers  1

                 2

Freight 

Forwarders 3

                 4

These could act like radio buttons. Then in the other column, show all of the aspects. Turn the ones that apply to the currently selected role green and disable or gray out the others. You could even add a third row that expressed why this set was important to the particular row (a bit of text or an image, etc..) This way you're keying and highlighting the aspects that apply to a focused item one at a time and providing an affordance to illustrate for the role of the participant exactly what applies without a crowded table of x's

Steve

Hi Geert.  Here's some thoughts.  I work in the Operations Mgmt and Supply Chain Profession and we LOOOVVVEEE tables like this.  If the goal is for this to be a chart to help managers plan, you could replace each cross with a marker that pops open and then holds information about the course training, durations, outcomes etc.  Take the same table and use it on a second slide where a manager could click on a cross and it would connect to a gantt chart which could then plot out a schedule against a calendar.  Attached to each click would be course information and duration and a person could plot out or even drag to a calendar.

Hope this helps!

Thx Steve, Chuck,

I'm experimenting with both of your idea's...

The initial goal was to display a summary of roles/training.... The customer would even be happy with it.

Yet, this would be boring as hell...

I've found a third parameter that might shed a different light/approach to this table. That is the stage.

There are different stages in the transport of dangerous goods by air.

Arrival, pre-flight, in-flight,post-flight and leaving.

Not all roles are necessary in each stage, therefore not all courses need to be shown.

Instead of showing the whole table with X-es all over the place, I can limit it by just be showing the subset that is relevant for the phase and have that phase selected by the user.

In addition when the user clicks on an 'X' (will be replaces by something more elegant), I'll show more details....

Thanks for the input!

Geert