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Build Excel Bullet Graphs for your Dashboard

Excel Dashboard

Topic: Creating a Bullet Chart in Excel

Thanks to a Dashboard Spy reader, we have this excellent video tutorial with step-by-step instructions on building bullet graphs for your Microsoft Excel dashboard. Mike Alexander of DataPig Technologies, a real Excel and Access guru with 7 published books to his credit, kindly provided this Excel Bullet Chart video.

Bullet graphs were developed and championed by Stephen Few, whom we mentioned fairly often on The Dashboard Spy, as an efficient way to convey information in a small space. Long known for his aversion to graphically-rich, but functionally-poor gauges, dials and such, Stephen suggests bullet graphs as excellent replacements on business intelligence dashboards.

Here are some screenshots of the video by Mike, who has done a really superb job on this video. Of course, these are just screenshots, so please check out the excel bullet graph video itself at the above link.

Formatting data series for Excel Bullet Graph

Note that the last picture shows a trick to creating the difficult-to-build horizontal bullet chart. Mike suggests the clever work-around of using the “paste picture link” to lay a bullet chart on its side. Where there’s a will….

Definitely check out the DataPig Technologies site. There is a lot of helpful content including a new blog to keep an eye on. By the way, if the name Mike Alexander sounds familiar to you Dashboard Spies, it’s because of the books that I’ve recommended in the past. Michael Alexander is the author of that great Xcelsius book that we all know and love! Here are a couple of his titles:

Crystal Xcelsius For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

Microsoft Access Data Analysis: Unleashing the Analytical Power of Access

Excel 2007 VBA Programmer’s Reference (Programmer to Programmer)

Pivot Table Data Crunching (Business Solutions)

Tags: Excel Dashboard, Excel Bullet Chart, Bullet Chart Dashboards, Bullet Chart Tutorial, Excel dashboards

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

One Response to “Build Excel Bullet Graphs for your Dashboard”

D eepak Saldanha. Said on February 14th, 2009 at 11:21 am quote
This is a great site to learn Dash-board.
need updated info for Dash-board.

Last Modified: Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 @ 14:59

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 2:46 pm 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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