A Look at Building Dashboards in Excel
Update: If you need a quick path to Microsoft Excel dashboards, consider these Excel Dashboard Templates from ExcelUser. They are plug and play, pure Excel worksheets. Just point them to your data source.
It’s not often that you get to look over the shoulder of a talented information visualization expert while he builds an Excel spreadsheet. Jorge Camoes’ post entitled How to Create a Dashboard in Excel allows us to do exactly that.
As Mr. Camoes wrote to me:
Just wanted to tell you about a dashboard I posted in my blog, the “Demographic Dashboard”. It is a fully functional Excel 2003 dashboard that uses population data from the US Census Bureau to show growth and age structures for each country around the world.
With this dashboard I wanted to show that an average Excel user can design a dashboard that fits the needs of his small/non-profit organization for data monitoring. I also tried to follow some visualization best practices (no gauges, no speedometers…).
Hope you can find it interesting.
Take a quick look at this Excel dashboard and you’ll agree that “interesting” is an understatement:

There is even an screen capture tutorial on how to use this demographic dashboard. The animation effects that show data trends projected into future years are particularly interesting.

Be sure to download the Excel dashboard itself. Go to the Excel Demographics Dashboard Download page and check out the different options.
Tags: Excel Dashboard, Excel Download, Dashboard Demo, Excel 2003 Dashboards, Demographics, Data Visualization
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