Dashboards by Example
    Digital Dashboard Examples & Best Practices.   From Excel Dashboards to Enterprise Business Intelligence, these dashboards contain KPIs, metrics, charts, trends and data visualizations. Learn the best practices of enterprise dashboard design by studying the work of your peers on business dashboard implementation teams around the world. Examine their digital dashboards and share your dashboard design tips in return.

For more Business Intelligence Dashboard Examples, use this link to the Dashboard Spy sitemap: Dashboard

Note: Dashboards By Example readers can get these interesting business intelligence dashboard white papers and I.T. trade magazines at no cost.

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.

Tutorial Bullet Chart Excel
Bullet Charts
Formatting data series for Excel Bullet Graph
microsoft excel bullet charts
horizontal bullet chart in excel

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

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.  

Leave a Reply




Want to see a different randomly selected business intelligence dashboard example? Click here to view another Digital Dashboard from the Dashboard Spy.

Dashboard Spy Readers: See these related Business Intelligence Dashboard posts:

Learn how to create Excel dashboards.

Latest posts of interest to the business intelligence dashboarding community - Have you read these recent enterprise dashboard posts?