Some years ago, as part of my (then) new job, I had to maintain a monthly updated Excel dashboard. It was a maintenance hell, I hated it, but I couldn’t change it because of my poor Excel skills.

“This is stupid, there must be a better way”, I kept saying to myself.

So, I searched, and searched, and searched, and within a few months I became the most skillful Excel user in my company and I could solve my initial problem. An all day long update turned into a ten minute task. I revamped the entire dashboard, but I kept the same user interface.

An Excel Dashboard is a Jigsaw Puzzle. Learn How to Solve It.

Back then, I was able to use some of the more common formulas, like most Excel users do. But if you want to create Excel dashboards you must understand how everything fits and works together. If you don’t, expect nothing less than a spreadsheet hell. You should never underestimate that.

I hate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, and I avoid them like the plague. If I suspect that a co-worker, after asking for a report, will come back and ask for different scenarios, I usually offer that functionality from the start. It’s a win-win situation: it doesn’t take longer than a static report, I avoid extra work and the user loves to play with his/her new toy.

Make Sure You Market Your Skills

As I said, I kept the same user interface in that dashboard. It proved to be a huge mistake, from a personal marketing/career perspective. After all these years, I still believe I made a remarkable job but, because I kept all the changes behind the scenes, they went unnoticed by the users — including the boss. Well, marketing and promotion is a big step out of my comfort zone, and office politics is not exactly what I do best…

Lessons Learned

That old dashboard was created by an above-average Excel user, but he failed to understand this basic concept: an Excel dashboard is a jigsaw puzzle, and fewer pieces makes it simpler to solve (for example, a simple pivot table can often replace dozens of formulas).

Go beyond the individual formulas. Create a project that forces you to learn how they work together (that’s what my dashboard tutorial is all about).

And never make your outstanding job invisible, use your Excel skills to work less but try to make sure that too much Excel will not harm your career…

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

How a Bad Excel Dashboard Made me a More Skilled Excel User

You may also be interested in:

1. How to create a dashboard in Excel
2. Fighting IT? Prototype an Executive Dashboard in Excel
3. 10 tips to improve your Excel dashboard

I am a moderately advanced Excel user. This means “a dangerous person” for the IT department, but I like this daily fight, and Excel dashboards are among my preferred weapons. Let’s see how they can be used.

Excel is the best tool for executive dashboard prototyping, because of its flexibility and development costs. Creating a fully functional prototype is not hard and it should be available for user feedback in a matter days. So, make sure that, every time you spot a dashboard project, a prototype in Excel is included.

Since most business intelligence applications are notorious for their lack of basic chart formatting options, it shouldn’t be hard for you to create a simply set of charts that the IT is unable to implement. If needed, use some advanced Excel charting techniques (including dummy series), but make sure they add real value to the user experience. Interactive features like visual what-if analysis are always cool and the users love them.

When presenting your project, do your best to convince your audience that you are technology-agnostic and all you care about is to create the best answer to users needs.

IT will try to change your project, naturally. Try to avoid the “security bomb” (their favorite). You know how poor their expensive BI toys are, and you should know what they can and can’t do with them. Minor concessions can earn you some points. When they tell you they can’t implement your core ideas be prepared to fake genuine surprise, compare costs (again) and emphatically say that their options clearly don’t meet the organization’s needs.

Pissing off the IT department is one of the most enjoyable games in corporate life, but be a gentleman and don’t make them look stupid. They don’t usually have a good sense of humour and take their quest to conquer the world very seriously. If you really want to implement the dashboard, don’t make it an island if you can avoid it (connect it to the tables in the IT infrastructure, instead of copy/pasting data). 

Seriously: Excel is a great tool for dashboard prototyping. You can easily create multiple alternative user interfaces, get feedback from users or find design flaws. The end result should be much better than trying to capture some ill-defined requirements and send them to the IT, where user interface design usually ranks very low in their priorities list.

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Fighting IT? Prototype an Executive Dashboard in Excel

You may also be interested in:

1. How to create a dashboard in Excel
2. How a Bad Excel Dashboard Made me a More Skilled Excel User
3. 10 tips to improve your Excel dashboard

I am sure Albert Einstein was thinking of Excel dashboards when he said “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. Let me tell you why.

Demographic Dashboard: The VBA edition

I published some time ago a first version of my Demographic Dashboard to show how an average Excel user could design a dashboard. This version is relatively complex, because it uses pivot tables and some recorded macros to manage the data.

Demographic Dashboard: The VBA-free edition

Then, partially because of a discussion around the use of VBA, I launched the VBA-free edition. It still uses pivot tables but I managed to remove all the VBA. Although I believe that VBA is a powerful tool that should be used when needed, many users are not comfortable with a programming language (not even in the simple form of recorded macros), so this version was designed to address their concerns.

Demographic Dashboard: The Lookup edition

Prior versions use a pivot table connected to an external data source, but I believe that a large majority of Excel users are not aware of pivot tables and how powerful and helpful they can be. Wouldn’t it be nice to just copy/paste into the Excel sheet a simple flat file and design the dashboard around it? Isn’t that standard procedure for these users?

So, by popular demand (sort of) I decided to get rid of the pivot table and design a new version. No VBA, no pivot tables. Just a simple data table and some lookup functions.

Let me tell you this: If you want to follow this path, don’t. It can be really complicated. And creating or updating a data set in Excel by copy/pasting the data is unreliable, dangerous and can seriously compromise your dashboard. But if you need that adrenaline boost go ahead, try it!

Before that, let me share with you some interesting stats. Since I have three versions of a very similar dashboard it make sense to compare performances, so I implemented a simple metric: how long does each dashboard take to cycle through all the 55 time periods? Here are the results in my new computer:

• VBA version: 15 seconds;
• VBA-free version: 45 seconds;
• Lookup version: 2:15 minutes.

This is not exactly unexpected. If you need a (very) long formula to calculate something that you can easily get using a simple GETPIVOTABLE formula performance will drop sharply. On the other hand, the file size of the Lookup version is half the size of versions using pivot tables. If you are planning to email it this could be an option.

Get the Demographic Dashboard Lookup

The VBA-Free and the Lookup Editions of the Demographic Dashboard are bundled with the Demographic Dashboard Tutorial. If you want to create powerful Excel dashboards I am sure this tutorial can help you.

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Performance vs flexibility in Excel: Demographic Dashboard Lookup Edition

You may also be interested in:

1. The Excel Demographic Dashboard in StarOffice/OpenOffice? Not yet.
2. How to create a dashboard in Excel
3. Creating a VBA-free Excel dashboard

Some metaphors are really stupid. Convincing people that running a company is like driving a car and you need a similar dashboard is one of them. If you are naive enough to buy it, most dashboard vendors will happily fill up your precious screen real estate with irrelevant gauges and and speedometers designed to look “cool”.

Futuristic aesthetics sells very well, but what happens when the future arrives and doesn’t look exactly like the image you bought? Will you buy a new one?

Look at that eye-catching, high-tech gauges in your dashboard and now compare them to this dashboard in the Lamborghini Reventon. Suddenly you feel tired and lost in the past… Your dashboard looks as old as an old Flash Gordon movie… How embarrassing will be to show it again…

Now that you’ve learned your lesson, put the your dashboard in design mode and make it clean, elegant and timeless. Remove textures and add data. Keep it simple and to the point. When people asked you for those cool gauges don’t laugh in their faces. Help them. You know better now.

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Car dashboards: a broken metaphor for executive dashboards

You may also be interested in:

1. Fighting IT? Prototype an Executive Dashboard in Excel
2. Dashboard design: we need best practices for best practices
3. Less is more, more is more

Bonavista Systems announced today an Excel Dashboard Competition. Participants stand a chance to win an iPhone, a workshop hosted by Stephen Few and a copy of Few’s “Information Dashboard Design”. Unlike other competitions, there is no data set. You just have to use Excel and MicroCharts, their sparkline generator. You don’t need to buy MicroCharts to enter the competition, just download it and use the trial period of 30 days to create the dashboard (it’s a nice add-in, and you’ll probably want to buy it after you test it).

Let me give you a piece of advice on this. If you are planning to enter the competition don’t send them pie charts, 3D charts or lots of primary colors. Your message will not pass their spam filter and they’ll do voodoo on you for the rest of your life. Keep the dashboard simple and clean and make sure that its purpose is clear.

So, good luck.

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Excel dashboard competition

You may also be interested in:

1. Fighting IT? Prototype an Executive Dashboard in Excel
2. Performance vs flexibility in Excel: Demographic Dashboard Lookup Edition
3. Creating a VBA-free Excel dashboard

Do you need VBA to create an Excel dashboard? Our recent discussion clearly shows two lines of thought: a) you should use it because there are things you just can’t do without VBA and if you have access to a powerful tool you should put it to work; b) you should avoid VBA like the plague because the average user don’t understand it and it can cause a serious problem if the programmer leaves the organization.

In an informal survey among friends and colleagues (all of them Excel users), I’ve discovered that 55% doesn’t know what VBA is, 40% knows but doesn’t want to use it, 4% uses recorded macros from time to time and 1% actually edits the recorded macros to add some sort of functionality (well, this happens to be me…).

The real world always depresses me…

The poll on the right seems to tell a better story, but you guys are le crème de la crème, so I can’t use you as a representative sample, I’m sorry…

The first version of my Demographic Dashboard uses some macros to synchronize pivot tables and to add some functionality to the user interface. Simple stuff, really. But there is a divide, and I had to know if I could create a VBA-free Demographic Dashboard.

That’s a the simple story behind the VBA-free Demographic Dashboard. This dashboard uses the same data set (population by sex, age and country for the period 1996-2050) and the final result is similar (that was the idea). But how can you achieve the same results without VBA? Just simplify, simplify, simplify. Let me give you some examples.

Dashboard objects

Some times we use VBA out of laziness. Take a look at this object: I could place the background image on the sheet and use a few lines of code to correctly place the small triangle. That was my first idea. But why? Why don’t you just use a chart? It is simpler, safer and doesn’t require VBA. The final solution uses a simple scatter plot. Yes, I know, it doesn’t look like one. It’s amazing the things you can do with scatter plots.

I already published a screencast on how to create a population pyramid, but this technique is missing. I wanted to recreate a popular chart format in magazines: lines to encode the current data and areas for the reference data.

I was unable to come up with an elegant solution using the standard available formats in Excel, so I had to improvise. This is a regular area chart, but I use the camera tool to rotate the image to achieve this effect.

Please note that you shouldn’t use this technique if you are planning to print your dashboard because of a well known bug in Excel (but there is also a workaround).

In the previous version of the dashboard I used lines in a scatter plot to display current and reference data. No need for the camera tool.

I really like this chart. It is amazing how it shows the aging process that currently affects every country in the world, specially if you can animate it to see how the passage of time changes the dependencies. As an European I find it really scary…

In this version, the active country is shown in the context of the active region and, unlike the previous version, it also shows the remaining countries, so the user can see the region in context.

I usually delete grid lines, but here they are almost invisible and they actually seem to help. Sometimes I forget that scatter plots are square by definition, but not in this case…

I don’t have a single post discussing sparklines, partially because I like to stick to things that everyone can do with a standard Excel installation (and you’ll usually need an add-in to create sparklines) and because there is so much to say about them that I wanted to write a complete series, and I don’t seem to find the time to do that. But you should definitively consider using them when planning a dashboard.

What you see on the left are not exactly sparklines, just a small line chart where each line is aligned with the country name. I kind of like these lines jumping out of their “natural borders” (the row limits and the table itself). Download the dashboard and compare these lines with the top ten countries in Europe, for example.

Lately I’ve been playing a little with links to external sources and I decided to add these two. The first one opens a Google Map with the active country and the second one opens the CIA Factbook for the same country. You don’t need to hard-code the links, it is just a string that is automatically changed whenever you change your data (in this case, the name of the country). You can also put the data into your worksheet, like I did when I created my Excel thematic map.

There is something that you can’t do without VBA. When you select a region, the list of countries automatically reflects that change, but the current country is not changed. A simple macro can easily select a new value when a different region is selected. So, you may be comparing Angola with countries in Europe (Angola is in Africa). Since I can’t change the default country, I added a conditional formatting for that cell, and when the country is not found in that region the background changes to warn the user.

Get the VBA-Free Demographic Dashboard

The VBA-Free edition, as well as the Lookup edition are bundled with the Demographic Dashboard Tutorial, a step-b-step video tutorial that will certainly boost your Excel skills. Check it out!

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Creating a VBA-free Excel dashboard

You may also be interested in:

1. Performance vs flexibility in Excel: Demographic Dashboard Lookup Edition
2. The Excel Demographic Dashboard in StarOffice/OpenOffice? Not yet.
3. How to create a dashboard in Excel

Do you need VBA to create an Excel dashboard? Should you take the plunge and go beyond Excel formulas? Well, I think you should, but feel free to disagree. Charley Kyd, commenting on my review of his e-book, disagrees:

As a consultant, I visited too many clients where an Excel user had written some macros, used them for a while, and then left the company. The people who remained treated those macros as magic, until the magic failed.

Therefore, I always try to find solutions that avoid user-written macros… even recorded ones.

Yes, a reality check is always a good starting point, and based on my own experience, I would say he’s right. There seems to be an invisible line that most users don’t dare to cross, here be dragons. I would say that, for an advanced Excel user, adding VBA to her worksheets (at least in the form of recorded macros), is a natural path to take, but perhaps that’s not encouraged and never becomes a priority.

If you are planning an Excel dashboard, your top technical priority should be how to handle the data (how to get it into Excel; how to manage updates; how to calculate metrics, how to prepare it for the dashboard reports). It’s not an easy task, specially if you cripple yourself by not using at least a small amount of recorded code.

Let me give you an example. My Demographic Dashboard uses pivot tables to handle the data. There are several tables, and I use some basic macros to synchronize them (when the user selects a country, a macro selects that country in each table – very basic stuff).

But what happens if you ditch macros altogether? That’s what I am testing in a new project I am currently working on, a VBA-free version of Demographic Dashboard.

When you rely solely on Excel functions you need to bring data into Excel as close to the final format as possible. If not, you’ll have to calculate it and you’ll end up with hundreds or even thousands of formulas. So, unless you have a very fast computer or a very small data set, performance can be a serious issue here.

What do you do? You must aggregate the data before importing it into Excel. But you may end up with several views of the same data, and that raises a new problem, how to synchronize them. Assuming you are not copy/pasting the data into Excel (you aren’t, are you?), you’ll have to setup some queries in your data source and link them from Excel. Of course you’ll have to manually refresh the tables when data changes.

I believe that using VBA and pivot tables is much safer than relying on look-up formulas. It is cleaner, has a lower maintenance cost and you can have some amenities for the users that you can’t offer without code. For example, if you are designing a marketing dashboard to be shared among several product managers, it would be nice to automatically select the right configuration (product, market, measures) when the user opens the dashboard. But you need the user id to be able to accomplish this, and you need VBA to get it from the system.

There is a compromise solution whereby you store the data in a single, larger pivot table that you do not need to change, just refresh. Then there will be some intermediate calculations to setup the data source for the dashboard report itself. This is what I am testing now.

I don’t have a definitive answer to the question in the post title. When my inner voice says “this is stupid, find a better solution” I usually do it (I’m very obedient). This is the first step to learn new things, and curiosity only kills cats.

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Excel Dashboards: do you need VBA?

You may also be interested in:

1. Performance vs flexibility in Excel: Demographic Dashboard Lookup Edition
2. How to create a dashboard in Excel
3. 10 tips to improve your Excel dashboard

The other day I was reading Dundas’ whitepaper “Best Practices for Building Digital Dashboards” (PDF) and you know what? What they say makes a lot of sense. I agree with at least 75% of what is written. For example:

… developers must be careful that the visuals do not interfere with the usability and efficiency of the digital dashboard…

or

Context is an item which in most dashboards is completely forgotten. This is baffling, as without context, KPIs are completely useless.

This really took me off guard. I was prepared for the worst and and what I get is this six-page whitepaper full of good advices that even Tufte would follow.

But wait… My skeptical mind wants to know if they practice what they preach. So, for example, what kind of context could we provide in a typical Dundas dashboard?

Here it is: add a little green stripe to a gauge, call it “context” et voilà: best practices at their best. Take a look at the report for similar insightful concepts “regarding usability and efficiency of the digital dashboard”.

Corollary: if you follow best practices and use common sense, you’ll be lost soon.

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Dashboard design: we need best practices for best practices

You may also be interested in:

1. Chart Design: Abortion Ratios 1980-2003
2. Performance vs flexibility in Excel: Demographic Dashboard Lookup Edition
3. How to create a dashboard in Excel

If you google for “Excel dashboards”, 6 out of the first 10 results link to Charley Kyd’s ExcelUser website or some of his affiliates. MrExcel calls Charley Kyd “the king of Excel dashboards”.

There is a good reason for that. Three years ago, Charley Kyd published an e-book, Dashboard Reporting with Excel, probably one of the first books discussing charts in the context of dashboard reporting (he recently published an Excel 2007 version). The reader will find sound advice on the use of some Excel techniques, dashboard planning or external database connection. A useful step-by-step tutorial is presented at the end of the e-book.

Kyd helps you to create a static, printer-friendly dashboard…

According to Kyd, a dashboard should be printed. This is obvious as soon as you look at any of his examples, like the one on the left, and, knowing the level of computer illiteracy at the higher management level, he has a point. For your dashboard project, don’t assume that the users will want to see the dashboard on screen. At least ask them.

Some of Kyd’s principles and techniques are freely available on the website, although you should refer to the e-book for a more detailed discussion. For example, regarding dashboard design, Kyd disapproves the use of gauges and condemns “pablum dashboards” (low data-density dashboards).

When discussing the benefits of dashboard reporting for management, he argues that Excel is often overlooked as a dashboard reporting tool because a) vendors prefer to offer costly proprietary solutions; b) users are not aware of the potential of Excel as a dashboard tool; and c) users overlook Excel’s capabilities to produce high-quality, magazine-like reports.

The dashboard design can be much improved by the use of smaller charts and templates for future reuse, and a magazine-like formatting. To achieve this “magazine-like” quality Kyd uses extensively the camera tool. In fact, he says that:

Without the Camera tool, you would find it virtually impossible to create high-quality dashboard reports. [page 77 of the e-book]

The camera tool is interesting, but this is an overstatement (there are many good examples that don’t use it, as you can see in the final pages of Stephen Few’s Information Dashboard Design). And of course there is the well known and persistent Excel bug that resizes a chart if you used the camera tool to display it (Kyd alert for that here; possible workarounds can be found here).

I have a different approach to dashboard design (more on that later) but I would recommend the Dashboard Reporting with Excel e-book if you plan to design a printer-oriented dashboard. Perhaps you should explore the website first (check those links above) to see if you/your audience are comfortable with Kyd’s dashboard approach.

A side note: Kyd tells us that “the most common mistake that Excel users make when they create charts is to make their charts too large.” He’s right, but given the higher resolution you can get from a printer, you have the option to drop Excel standard charts altogether and use sparklines instead.

… but there is something that bothers me

I confess there is something that bothers me when I see Kyd’s arguments in favor of Excel dashboards. It is this magazine-quality thing (he emphasizes this throughout the e-book and also on the website). He says in the e-book:

Ideally, benchmark reports should look like they came from a magazine or newspaper. This makes the reports both interesting and easy to read.

As a rule, however, bean counters aren’t qualified to design magazine-quality reports, just as graphic artists aren’t qualified to design cost accounting systems. But bean counters can copy graphic designs they find in magazines and newspapers. [page 17 of the e-book]

I understand what he means, but I believe something is lost in translation, because that’s what the readers already do, and the results are far from stellar. (A creepy idea: if “bean counters can copy graphic designs” then graphic designers can design cost accounting systems. After all, they are designers…)

I don’t even know where to begin… let’s see:

• When people don’t understand what they are copying they usually try to improve on it. So, that 3D, flying, 389 slices, primary colors, pie chart you saw in the last marketing presentation was probably inspired by a simple 2D, three slices, soft colors pie chart published in a magazine;
• If you don’t have control over typography (and in Excel you don’t) you can’t expect to get a good replica of a chart made in Adobe’s inDesign;
• Try to see a management dashboard as a portrait that captures the essence of the organization. You should make it simple, but if you use a magazine as a role model you’ll make it simpler than it should (quoting Einstein, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”);
• If yours is an untrained (design-wise) look, browsing magazines searching for something to copy from is a receipt for disaster. I love graphic design (it’s a platonic thing, I’m afraid), but your typical graphic designer couldn’t care less about good quantitative data visualization;

A different approach

I understand and respect Kyd’s work and I know that there is a market for printer-oriented dashboards. My approach is somewhat different. I believe that, given the amount of data we have to deal with, a minimum level of interaction is needed. For example, if you are monitoring your competition, you should show the user a predefined set of competitor products but you should also let her choose a different set from a larger list. Interaction is a fundamental way to build knowledge. In my Demographic Dashboard I try to show how this is easily implemented in Excel.

One of the problems with Excel dashboards is how you get the data into Excel… Kyd discusses six methods: 1) build-from-scratch spreadsheet reporting; 2) spreadsheet databases; 3) pivot tables and 4-6) OLAP cubes. I will not even bother to look at the first two (if you want an highway to spreadsheet hell, be my guest, use them). The last one (specially what he calls “Excel-friendly OLAP”) is the best option, but probably too advanced for the average Excel user.

This leaves us with pivot tables. They are safer than other basic methods and don’t require much interaction with the IT… According to Kyd, their main disadvantage is:

Excel formulas only can reference data that PivotTables return to spreadsheet cells. This forces Excel users to interact with each PivotTable to update their report data, rather than interacting only with controlling cell values in Excel.

He’s right, but the dashboard designer just needs a macro (he can record it) to change values. Let me exemplify:

PivotTables(“x”).PivotFields(“Year”).CurrentPage = Range(“selYear”).Value

This single line changes the Year field in pivot table “x” to whatever value is found in cell “selYear”. You just need one line for each pivot table. Then the macro is attached to a button et voilá! you have a basic interaction. Not too hard…

It really doesn’t matter if you use printer, on-screen or smoke signal dashboards. What matters are the insights a user gets from the data and how they can support better decisions.

Judging from your experience, do you think there is a pattern that can be used as a rule of thumb (like “higher management prefer printed dashboards, middle management prefer on-screen dashboards”) or, as usual, it depends?

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Excel dashboards according to Charley "ExcelUser" Kyd

You may also be interested in:

1. Excel Dashboards: do you need VBA?
2. How to create a dashboard in Excel
3. Performance vs flexibility in Excel: Demographic Dashboard Lookup Edition

Excel is a great (but underrated) BI tool. Several BI vendors gave up fighting it and offer Excel add-ins as front-ends for their BI solutions. So, if you want to create a dashboard you should consider Excel, since it really offers better functionalities than many other applications for a fraction of the cost and development time. I know that Excel is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but first you should be sure that your requirements are not met by Excel. Let me share with you some random tips from my experience with the Demographic Dashboard.

But, shouldn’t I just ask my IT to create the dashboard?
This is a fact: many IT departments hate Excel. The IT spends millions in BI solutions and users keep using Excel. Why? Because they know it, they like it, they feel in control and can do what ever they want with the data. Ask your BI manager to replicate the image above using an expensive BI solution and he’ll come back six month later with something you didn’t ask for, to answer a need you don’t have anymore (I know, I’m oversimplifying…). Do you know Master Foo Defines Enterprise Data?

1. Go to the point, solve a business need
So, you have your idea for a dashboard, you’ve discuss the project it with the users (right?) and you are ready. But where to start? Remember this: a graph, a table, the entire dashboard, are merely instrumental to solve a business need. It’s about insights, not about data, not about design.

2. Don’t use formulas
Yes, I know, this is Excel, and it is supposed to have formulas. What I am telling you is that you should aim at minimizing the number of independent formulas, and this should be a fundamental constraint to your global strategy. Too often I see Excel used as a database application. It is not, it is a spreadsheet (not everyone finds this obvious).

Over the years I had my share of “spreadsheet hell”: a lookup formula in the middle of nowhere would reference a wrong range for no apparent reason. An update cycle adds a new column and suddenly there are errors all over the place. You leave the project for a week and when you come back you don’t know what all those formulas mean. Even if everything goes smoothly the auditing dep wants to trace every single result.

But how do you minimize the use of formulas? If your data table resides in an Excel sheet you’ll have to rely heavily on lookup formulas, and that’s one of the highways to spreadsheet hell. Instead, get the data from an external source (access, OLAP cube…) and bring data into Excel. Calculations should be performed at the source. After removing all the formulas you can, the remaining should be as clear as possible.

3. Abuse Pivot Tables
Every object (graph, table) in the Demographic Dashboard is linked to a pivot table. Let me give you an example. One of the charts shows population growth over the years, using 1996 as reference. Pivot tables can calculate that directly, I don’t need to add a new layer of complexity by using formulas (to calculate the actual values and look up formulas to get them).

The population table has 200,000 records, so I coundn’d fit into the Excel limit of 65 thousand rows (yes, that’s changed in Excel 2007, but it is debatable if a table with a million rows in a spreadsheet application can be considered good practice). By using a pivot table I can overcome that limit.

4. Use named ranges
To be able to use self-document formulas (“=sales-costs” is much simpler to understand than “=$D$42-$F$55″) is one of several uses of named ranges. But they are also the building blocks of interaction with the user and they make your Excel dashboard more robust.

5. Use as many sheets as you need, or more
You don’t have to pay for each additional sheet you use in a workbook, so use as many as you need. Each cell in your dashboard report sheet should point to some other sheet where you actually perform the calculations. You should have at least three groups of sheets: a sheet with the dashboard report itself, sheets with the base data and other group with supporting data, definitions, parameters, etc. Add also a glossary sheet and a help sheet.

6. Use autoshapes as placeholders
Once you know what you need, start playing with the dashboard sheet. Use autoshapes to test alternative layouts or, better yet, use real objects (charts, tables…) linked to some dummy data.

7. Get rid of junk
There are two ways to wow your users: by designing a dashboard that actually answer needs, or by planting gauges and pie charts all over the place (this one can guarantee you a promotion in some dubious workplaces, but it will not help you in the long run). In the series on Xcelsius Dashboards you can see how difficult is to create something beyond the most basic and irrelevant charts.

So, get rid of Excel defaults (take a look at this before/after example) and just try to make your dashboard as clean and clear as possible. You’ll find many tips around here to improve your charts, so I’ll not repeat myself.

8. Do you really need that extra-large chart?
Charts are usually larger than they should. What it really matters in a chart is the pattern, not the individual values, and that can be seen even with a very small chart.

9. Implement some level of interaction
A dashboard is not an exploratory tool, is something that should give you a clear picture of what is going on. But I believe that at least a basic level of interactions should be provided. User like to play with the tools and can they learn a lot more than just looking at some static image.

10. Document your work
Please, please, structure and document your workbook. Excel is a very flexible environment, but with flexibility comes responsibility… I am not a very organized person myself, but from time to time I try the tourist point of view: I pretend I never saw that file in my life and I’ll try to understand it. If I can’t or takes me too long, either I must redesign it or write a document that explains the basic structure and flow.

Bonus tip: there is always something missing…
Once you have a prototype, user will come up with new ideas. Some of them can be implemented, others will ruin your project and if you accept them you’ll have to restart from scratch. So, make sure the specifications are understood and approved and the consequences of a radical change are clear.

This is far too incomplete, but I’ll try to improve it. Will you help? Do you have good tips specific to the design of Excel dashboards? Please share them in the comments.

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

10 tips to improve your Excel dashboard

You may also be interested in:

1. 10 x 10 Tips to improve your (Excel) charts: formatting
2. 10 x 10 Tips to improve your (Excel) charts: general tips
3. Performance vs flexibility in Excel: Demographic Dashboard Lookup Edition