Dashboards

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

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, [...]

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Fighting IT? Prototype an Executive Dashboard in Excel

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 [...]

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Performance vs flexibility in Excel: Demographic Dashboard Lookup Edition

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 [...]

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Car dashboards: a broken metaphor for executive dashboards

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 [...]

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Excel dashboard competition

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Excel Dashboards: do you need VBA?

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 [...]

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Dashboard design: we need best practices for best practices

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 [...]

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Excel dashboards according to Charley “ExcelUser” Kyd

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 [...]

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10 tips to improve your Excel dashboard

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 [...]

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How to create a dashboard in Excel

Excel is the best place to start designing a new executive report or dashboard. Because of its flexibility, you can virtually design any dashboard in Excel exactly the way you, or the users, imagined (and then send project to IT for implementation).
Once you know what will the dashboard be used for and what kind of [...]

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