You work with data. There is a formal BI tool in your organization, but it is unusable (IT is proud of it). You spend your precious time copying data from the tool to Excel. That’s why you leave work late. You could be with the guys at the bar, or playing with the kids. You enjoy working with data, but not like that. It takes ages for you to do something because of those stupid, time-consuming tasks.

More Pain

Another quarter, another quarter review. You could update a PowerPoint presentation but no, top management changed the metrics (it always does), and you have to redo everything from scratch (Sisyphus is your middle name). And because of the branding thing, only a square inch is available for real content, like those 3D pie charts they love so much.

Recently, a competitor launch an under-the-radar campaign in some counties. Your sales went south. The data was there, sleeping like angels in the IT servers. But a report was missing and the IT guys can’t tell the difference between a tortilla and Venus de Milo, so that went unnoticed. The IT is now planning a new report that will be implemented using the BI tool, as soon as all requirements are met, of course. It should be available by the end of next year. The beta version, I mean.

Guts ‘n’ Pies Management

You know that something is wrong, you just know. Data is expensive, the BI tool was/is expensive and the end result is a few tables and some fancy charts. Is this a proper decision-supporting system? It isn’t. It’s a farce called guts-and-pies management. Gut-based decisions and pies to justify the expense (I mean, the investment). And you hate it.

So You Start Wondering

You are not an Excel expert, it’s not your job, but you’ve been trying to automate as many boring tasks as possible. You ended up a reluctant advanced Excel user.

And then a while ago you discover that two charts side by side are much better than one in each slide. It’s almost a dashboard. That plotting growth against market share in a scatter plot makes much more sense than making two bar charts (by the way, there isn’t a 3D scatter plot available in Excel and this chart actually forces the audience to wake up and think; that’s why it is banned from so many organizations). You don’t know it yet, but you are discovering data visualization.

I see that you are asking some inconvenient questions, like “how can I connect a workbook to the Oracle database?”. The IT starts disliking you. Your 3D chart ratio and PPT effects are much below average. Your presentations, I’m afraid to tell you, are boring. Their opinion, not mine.

What are you going to do now?

There is no way back. You must know how deep is the rabbit hole. You must know more about Excel, about dashboards, about data visualization. Because good data analysis, visualization and communication are long-term skills that will help you stay competitive in the labor market. You can easily design a dashboard with those skills. Excel is optional, but if you want to actually implement a working dashboard in Excel you must learn some advanced formulas and not-so-advanced VBA (yes, I know, you are not a programmer, you don’t have to).

Your Current Job

Your plan is to learn how to create an Excel dashboard, find some unmet needs and design a couple of dashboards that you’ll try to sell internally. That’s a good plan, but don’t fall in love with the dashboards. Make sure they see the difference between the dashboard and the current reports, but draw a line. Consider them prototypes and tell the management IT should implement them (it should be easy, with such an expensive BI tool, right?). They will hate you, of course. Do you mind?

You are a naive if you think that these dashboards will change anything. They will not. Corporate culture changes slowly and there are many misconceptions about charts. If, in spite of everything, you like to work there,  try to find a good sponsor in the management team and work with her. It’s your only chance.

Resources

You need some good resources, so here are some of the best. Read Edward Tufte’s and Stephen Few’s books. They are not optional. Subscribe to leading blogs. Jon, Chandoo, Mike, Daniel or Debra can help you a lot. Don’t let yourself to be distracted from your goal by all those great visualizations you keep stumbling upon. And, shameless plug, you can get access to my Excel dashboards tutorial.

Turning Off the Crystal Ball

My crystal ball also tells me that you are a male, in your late twenties or thirties, graduate school educated and work for a fairly large organization, in marketing, sales or finance (not IT, God forbid!). If you are a manager you manage a small department, five people at most. Is this correct? Please don’t tell me that you are a little old lady with too much spare time… you aren’t, are you? I’m still training my clairvoyance skills and I may be misreading some signs.

So, if this is not you, who are you? And what do you need Excel dashboard for? You can undress in the comments below… And if you are not comfortable with that, you can start by “I have this friend…”.

[Update: There are great comments below, so why don't you join the conversation? And check out Chandoo’s post too.)

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Excel Dashboards: Who Needs Them, Anyway?

You may also be interested in:

1. Excel Dashboards: do you need VBA?
2. Excel, Crystal Xcelsius, dashboards and domain names
3. Car dashboards: a broken metaphor for executive dashboards

The original post is titled Excel Dashboards: Who Needs Them, Anyway? , and it came from The Excel Charts Blog .

Here is a trick that you can use: write a sentence or a paragraph that summarizes the core message. For example “Our sales are growing in an expanding market, and we are gaining market share, specially in these sales territories”. Discuss this sentence with the users. Is this what they want to know? Do they need more? Do they need less?

Once you have the sentence, break it and use each segment as a chart title:

• “Sales are growing | declining…” (chart one)
• “… in an expanding | shrinking market…” (chart two)
• “… and we are gaining | loosing market share… ” (chart three)
• “… specially in these territories… ” (chart four)
• etc.

This trick assumes that you can define dynamic titles that change depending on one or more parameters (you can do it in dashboards for Excel). It has several advantages:

• Helps you and the users to define what is relevant and what is not;
• Makes it easier for you to know where to place the charts;
• Offers the user a clear message template: they can use it as-is or they can add more detail;
• Improves the overall consistency of your dashboard.

I used this trick recently and the users loved it. There are many approaches to dashboard design. This is a simple and practical one, but it may not be the right one for your needs. Whatever you do, make sure your dashboard follows good design guidelines.

What about you? What is your starting point when designing dashboards? Share it in the comments below.

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Consistent dashboard design: write a simple sentence

You may also be interested in:

1. Dashboard design: we need best practices for best practices
2. Will you Help Me Write a Data Visualization E-Book (and Win a Free Copy)?

The original post is titled Consistent dashboard design: write a simple sentence , and it came from The Excel Charts Blog .

I face an issue that has nothing to do with Excel itself: human resistance. I showed a dashboard to my manager and he answered to me that my dashboard is too difficult for him and for top management and insisted to use simple XL-tables with lots of data. I’m a bit confused, why such innovative approach is not accepted by the management? Have you faced with such issues in your professional life?

I know how you feel, and I’m sure many readers do, too. It’s not about the dashboard,  its about change. Everyone resists to change. Often change threatens our believes or, more selfishly, our status and lifestyle. It is a complex issue, and there are no simple and actionable answers. Let’s see what can go wrong.

The Pygmalion Syndrome

If people resist changes you are promoting, you may need to look in the mirror and yourself “what am I doing wrong?”. This one is hard to swallow, I know. You spend weeks or months working hard and you fall in love with your creation. Then nothing happens. People fail to realize how beautiful the creature is.

Breaking news: they actually couldn’t care less. Let me be brutally honest: if you are an Excel expert, chances are you are at the bottom of the food chain and you know much less about the business than you think you know.

What you should do:

• Ask the right people the right questions;
• Study internal presentations and find how people look at the data;
• If you are using charts and other people are using tables, you should find patterns they overlooked (if you don’t, try harder);
• Come up with a vision and share it; show how a dashboard improves current processes;
• Make a draft and ask for feedback;
• Make sure you know the difference between what users say they need and what they really need;
• Find common needs and translate them into a dashboard that improves what they already have and gives them something more (don’t promise the moon);
• Work with the users, make sure you deliver what they need but, at the end of the day, it’s your dashboard, not theirs (you’re the expert, and you’ll be harshly reminded of that case something goes wrong).

You are allowed to fall in love with your creature if, and only if, you understand that the creature is the whole process, not the worksheet.

Inertia vs. Innovation

We often have to manage more than we can handle. We can offload some of the burden by delegating and/or by switching to auto-mode. Routines are great time and energy savers but also inertia-inducers. Sure, many users are open to innovation, provided they don’t have to move their asses off the couch. Don’t underestimate inertia.

To overcome inertia, you need at least an initial force. If you can’t sell the benefits of your dashboard the users will not move an inch.

Many users fail to understand that a better chart is much more than a design thing, a prettified chart with no inherent added value. That’s why you must teach them. A before/after comparison can be very useful, but it must be a guided discovery:

• If they are using tables, show them how they can process much more data using charts;
• If they are using Excel chart defaults and 3D charts, show them how simple formatting changes can help them get insights faster;
• If they are using a single chart, show them how multiple charts (small multiples, dashboards…) can improve their analysis;
• If they are using static charts, show them how they can take advantage of their business knowledge to explore the data dynamically.

Always remember: if they have no compelling reason to move, they will always find a perfectly acceptable reason to keep things as they are. Provide a clear path, and make sure nothing important is left behind.

Office Politics

Well, you can’t avoid it, can you? Office politics (all kinds of politics, actually…) have a deservedly bad reputation, usually because of some rotten apples.

If you are un obscure geek with a great idea you are doomed. If a product manager that knows how to grow her connections has the same idea, then she will probably succeed whereas the poor geek doesn’t even know where to begin…

If your network is weak, you should plan way ahead. Remember: most people don’t even know that charts and dashboard can actually be useful, and not just a (hopefully) pretty way to illustrate some numbers. So, you should start raising awareness and curiosity.

Target some standard reports that could be vastly improved and create alternative designs (Excel is a great prototyping tool). Tell users something like this: “Try to forget everything you know about the market and tell me what you can learn from [current report]. Now, let’s try again: what can you learn from [your design]?”. You’ll get great feedback and win people’s attention.

Find a sponsor. Share your vision and focus your message on the benefits for the organization. Quantify them, if possible. Avoid technicalities, no one cares.

Charts Are Not Serious Enough

Many managers believe that charts belong to PowerPoint presentations (there are many misconceptions about charts), and they will not use them for a more serious work. Hard figures with lots of decimal places feel a lot more credible, and who can blame them after three hours of flying pie charts?

Let me reiterate this: descriptive statistics, tables and charts are examples of tools we use to make sense of our data. They all have their strengths and they should all be taken seriously.You don’t miscalculate an average and you don’t design a misaligned table just for fun. Applying a 3D effect (or anything else) that hides or destroys a pattern in a chart do not add credibility and trust. You may get the eyeballs, but the brain is somewhere else.

They Are Not Visual

Old-school managers like tables and it’s hard to change the way they approach the decision making process. And there are non-visual people. People that love numbers, sound, motion, whatever. You can’t force charts upon them. But you can use a table.

Designing a good table is a lost art. Learn again how to sort rows and tables, how to label them, how to add meaningful calculations. And even if a table is the primary object in your report, you can always add graphical objects to help the reader. Design a table-on-steroids with sparklines, conditional formatting and links.

Change is Slow

Changing other people’s behavior is a slow and hard process. They’ll keep falling back into the old routines, even if they agree that the new ones are better. Make sure people understand the benefits and keep asking and giving feedback. If they don’t feel threatened change happens much faster.

I’m not a sales person, and trying to sell something is clearly outside my comfort zone, but I recognize that, at the end of the day, what really matters is not the product itself but how people’s lives are improved by the product. And you have to tell them…

So, what do you think? How do you create a market for your dashboard? What should Dmitry do?

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

How Do You Sell an Excel Dashboard?

You may also be interested in:

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

The original post is titled How Do You Sell an Excel Dashboard? , and it came from The Excel Charts Blog .

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. 10 tips to improve your Excel dashboard
2. Creating a VBA-free Excel dashboard
3. Car dashboards: a broken metaphor for executive dashboards

The original post is titled Fighting IT? Prototype an Executive Dashboard in Excel , and it came from The Excel Charts Blog .

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. Demographic Dashboard: The Crystal Xcelsius Edition?
2. The Excel Demographic Dashboard in StarOffice/OpenOffice? Not yet.
3. 10 tips to improve your Excel dashboard

The original post is titled Performance vs flexibility in Excel: Demographic Dashboard Lookup Edition , and it came from The Excel Charts Blog .

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. Demographic Dashboard: The Crystal Xcelsius Edition?
3. Dashboard design: we need best practices for best practices

The original post is titled Car dashboards: a broken metaphor for executive dashboards , and it came from The Excel Charts Blog .

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. Performance vs flexibility in Excel: Demographic Dashboard Lookup Edition
2. 10 tips to improve your Excel dashboard
3. Fighting IT? Prototype an Executive Dashboard in Excel

The original post is titled Excel dashboard competition , and it came from The Excel Charts Blog .

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.

______________________

Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Creating a VBA-free Excel dashboard

You may also be interested in:

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

The original post is titled Creating a VBA-free Excel dashboard , and it came from The Excel Charts Blog .

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. Excel dashboards according to Charley "ExcelUser" Kyd
2. Excel Dashboards: Who Needs Them, Anyway?
3. Excel, Crystal Xcelsius, dashboards and domain names

The original post is titled Excel Dashboards: do you need VBA? , and it came from The Excel Charts Blog .

… 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. Consistent dashboard design: write a simple sentence
2. Chart Design: Abortion Ratios 1980-2003
3. Design and information visualization: two worlds apart

The original post is titled Dashboard design: we need best practices for best practices , and it came from The Excel Charts Blog .