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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 Executive Dashboard with Sparklines - big ideas for small enterprise dashboards

Thanks to the Dashboard Spy in Germany who sent us this wonderful excel executive dashboard to study. It features an amazing amount of information packed into a tiny space (which is what the at-a-glance nature of the dashboard is all about!). The big secret, of course, is the tiny, little device called the Sparkline. Invented by the truly innovative Edward Tufte, it is a clever inline way to give a user a sense of scale, trend and historic movement of a statistic.

The dashboard itself deals with airline management. If it looks familiar to you, an earlier version of this airline dashboard graced the pages of the Dashboard Spy blog several weeks ago. It was the winner of a business intelligence contest. This current version is smaller and, in my opinino, cooler.

As Andreas from Bonavistasystems.com pointed out, this sparkline-driven excel dashboard is really optimized to be tiny:

All figures are formatted with Gill Sans MT 8 pt. The sparklines are formatted with Micro Line Charts 8 pt. The whole dashboard presents 340 figures on 420 x 420 pixels screen real estate. We build new hinted fonts that allow us to format colored sparklines as small as 8 pt without faint or hidden lines.

It was built with the new release of MicroCharts: http://www.bonavistasystems.com/DownloadMicroCharts.html

Here is the executive dashboard. Take a look at these great sparklines!

Sparkline Excel Dashboard

Homework: If you have not been exposed to Edward Tufte’s work, you must browse these pages of books by Tufte. Design and information architecture are the most critical items to an enterprise dashboard’s success. Particularly with the executive crowd, know what you are doing in terms of laying out the dashboard. Well worth studying is this lavishly illustrated book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

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 digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s books on enterprise dashboards. His current favorite is Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing executive dashboards.

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Last Modified: Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 @ 07:37

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 7:37 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.

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Excel Executive Dashboard with Sparklines - big ideas for small enterprise dashboards

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Dashboards by Example Volume 1 Goals and Objectives

What's on your Dashboard?