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
Read more →Archive for the ‘Dashboards’ Category
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
Read more →Funny story… I was playing with domain names today, trying to register names for future projects like “exceldashboards.com”. Unfortunately, this is already taken. And who owns it? Business Objects, the makers of Crystal Xcelsius (remember my Xcelsius dashboard series?). Type exceldashboards.com (I refuse to add a link)
Read more →I tried to create a Crystal XCelsius version of my Demographic Dashboard and failed miserably. But what about a new spreadsheet version? That should work, right? Wrong. I downloaded StarOffice 8 and just linked the pivot table (“datapilot”) to the Access population database via ODBC and waited…
Read more →This is the last post in a series where I examined the possibility of creating a Crystal Xcelsius dashboard using my Demographic Dashboard as a benchmark. I’ll discuss here my overall conclusions. I must say from the start that I am very disappointed. Let’s start by the
Read more →Can Crystal Xcelsius replace Excel as a charting tool? As the regular readers know, I am creating an Xcelsius version of my Excel Demographic Dashboard to answer this simple question. I am afraid the results until now are less than stellar. Although I could easily add four
Read more →Pascal Comelade, a french musician, plays toy pianos for a living. How many of us could do the same? How many of us could (professionally) use toys instead of our standard, grown-up tools? Now imagine that a toy maker starts marketing their toys as serious musical instruments.
Read more →Can my Excel Demographic Dashboard be recreated in Crystal XCelsius? This is the main theme for this series of posts. In the first post I set the stage, define the rules and show how the basic “demographic KPI’s” can be displayed using gauges. The second post discusses
Read more →Part 1: The Beginning I just downloaded the trial (full-featured) version of Crystal Xcelsius Professional 4.5. This is a typical dashboard solution from a leading vendor and, although Stephen Few doesn’t like it I decided to buy it. Well, on one simple condition: by the end of
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Excel dashboards and executive reports are powerful, fairly easy to design and a great way to improve your Excel and data visualization skills. Because of its flexibility, you can virtually design any dashboard in Excel exactly the way you, or the users, imagined. And, best of all,
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