Jorge Camoes’ Charts

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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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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… and waited… and waited… and finally [...]

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 data set and Xcelsius integration with Excel. I struggle everyday [...]