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From a simple excel dashboard to a fully integrated enterprise reporting suite, the Business Dashboard is being quickly adopted as the new face of Business Intelligence. It has a rapidly growing role in BI reporting and analysis.

An enterprise dashboard allows at-a-glance visualization of company health and monitoring of key performance indicators. Simple to understand and high in ROI, these executive dashboards are becoming "must-haves" for all enterprises. Easy-to-use by business users and fun-to-implement by the IT department, BI dashboard projects are quickly funded and politically popular.

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Excel-based Enterprise Dashboard - excel worksheet xls file download

The best way to get started in using Microsoft Excel for business dashboards is to grab an existing excel dashboard, take it apart and try it out on your own data. Here is a post that shows such a spreadsheet dashboard with a link to the xls file.

I see that many of you Dashboard Spies out there are very interested in the tried and true excel spreadsheet approach to dashboards. Thanks to a download from javaplanetinc.com, there is this excel dashboard xls file for you to play with. Here are 2 screenshots. The first shows the graphic presentation of the data. There are 2 larger sections across the top of the screen. On the left is a pie chart showing salary by department and on the right side, we have a simple listing of outstanding balances. Below this section we have 4 smaller portlets (sales by region, budget by project, current output by plant, and sales by business unit). To show you that this is straight excel, I’ve taken a screenshot of the second sheet in the workbook. Try this with your own data and see what you come up with. Remember to send us your dashboard screenshots so that we can all learn how executive dashboards apply to your business.

Business dashboard screenshot

excel-based dashboard

Homework: Don’t ignore excel as a dashboard tool. It’s graphing ability is powerful and the number of users is unmatched. If you need a refresher on the tool, see these books on excel.

Reading Assignment: Continuing on our study of the Malik book on implementing dashboards, please read this passage and think about how your company would go about choosing a dashboard vendor:

VENDOR SELECTION

There were four key criteria and feature requirements during the vendorselection process:

1. Web based for ease of access, administration, upgrades, security, andso on

2. Industry standard to ensure that experienced resources could be hired

3. Recognized and well-respected leader in the online analytical process-ing field

4. Company that spends a better than average percentage of revenues onR&D to ensure that applications remain competitive

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books.

Was this enterprise dashboard interesting enough to share? Help spread the news about Dashboards By Example. Click on the "Share" icon above to submit this post to your social bookmark service or email the link to a fellow dashboarder or even yourself.

What do you think about this dashboard post? Please leave a comment. Your opinions are valuable to the entire business dashboarding community.

2 Responses to “Excel-based Enterprise Dashboard - excel worksheet xls file download”

Ricardo Altmann Said on February 7th, 2008 at 7:58 am quote
It seems to be a good tool. I’m going to try to use this in my business
Jon Peltier Said on March 23rd, 2008 at 11:34 am quote
Excel is actually a very good dashboarding tool. Its data manipulation capabilities are powerful and flexible, and its display capabilities are very good as long as one keeps best practices in mind. Avoid the defaults, avoid things like 3D charts, bright colors, and pie charts.

Speaking of pie charts, if the title on the pie chart in the top left of the dashboard above is correct (”Average Salary by Work Department”), that is a completely inappropriate use of a pie chart. The averages in no way can add up to a whole of 100%, and that’s the only justification (and a weak one) for using a pie chart. Instead a bar or column chart would provide a much better visual for comparison of the average salaries of the different departments.

The 3D exploded pie chart in the second row of the dashboard is practically illegible. A 2D pie would be better, but a bar or column would be better still.

This blog has a lot of information and I take it a lot of faithful readers. It would be much stronger if it were more critical about the many example dashboards you exhibit. You could drive improvement of submitted examples and of the dashboards created by your readers.

I stopped reading the Dashboard Spy, because it presented the good and the bad, and made no judgement about which was which, or how to turn the bad into good.

Last Modified: Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 @ 14:03

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 6:37 am and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Dashboards by Example Volume 1 Goals and Objectives

"Dashboards By Example - BI Dashboard Samples" is the theme and mission statement of this blog. We salute the Dashboard Spy in the field - those business users, project managers, IT executives, application designers, business intelligence experts, analysts, coders and subject matter experts who are on site creating this exciting and new "face of BI". Your business intelligence dashboard can go by many names - performance dashboard, executive dashboard, business dashboard, balanced scorecard, KPI metric summary, enterprise dashboard, bi dashboard, corporate dashboard. Whatever we call it, we believe that the at-a-glance visual approach is the key to user-centric design. Let's learn from each other's dashboard examples and continue to increase the level of usability and usefulness.

We strongly believe that the more dashboards you study, the more adept you will become at choosing correct design solutions for your company. "Learn by Example" is not just a motto - we take it literally, hence the name "Dashboards by Example". So take every chance you get to view examples of BI interfaces. As a matter of fact, take a second now, and study this dashboard example.

What's on your Dashboard?

The Dashboard Spy wants your dashboards!! I've collected over 1000 screenshots of business intelligence dashboards and scorecards for Volume 1 and now need you to send me the next 1000 dashboards for Volume 2. Email me at info at dashboardspy.com and tell me about your dashboard. Send me images, notes, technical details, business rules, metrics, KPIs, anything that you think your fellow Dashboard Spies will have an interest in. Keep this library of dashboarding resources going!

Also, I'd love more links to both the main Dashboard Spy site at http://dashboardspy.com and the Volume 1 blog of 1000 dashboards at http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com. I'd love your help in making these resources better known.

Looking forward to seeing your dashboards, The Dashboard Spy

P.S. Did you check out this free dashboard template for wireframing? Click on the image below for the download link and instructions. Consider it a gift for your unfailing support. Thank you very much. Sincerely, your friend in dashboarding, Dash.