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Do-It-Yourself-Dashboards-Alive-and-Well

Dashboard Topic: Excel Dashboards - A Report from the Trenches.

Every once in a while, I get a submission of a business dashboard from a Dashboard Spy reader that makes me stop and really think about what dashboarding really is. I’m not trying to get philosophical on you, but we all live in a day and age where everything looks shiny and slick - often at the expense of real value. The dashboard vendors come and show us all these beautiful interfaces and we ooh and ahh, wowed by the eye candy. I sometimes think we buy reporting packages and engage vendors based more on how beautiful they can make our dashboards rather than suitablity to the task at hand - creating a business intelligence application or report that helps us manage our day to day activities.

A Dashboard Spy reader, Edwin Thorn, sent in a nice little note and a home-brewed Excel Dashboard. He calls it his “Excel Cockpit” and is quite proud of it. It will not win any graphic design awards - that is certain, but that does not take any value away from the effort. The Microsoft Excel does its job. It informs an entire department of the latest in sales trends. Built by a power user on the business side, it required nothing more than determination and self motivation. No IT department, no user interface team, just the users and the data.

So what this submission of the Excel dashboard (in this case, a management summary dashboard) make me think of is the value that “core” dashboarding brings. By core, I mean the focus on the metrics and KPIs. Not worrying all that much about the graphic design aspects. Of course that is important, but don’t let it slow down the rest of the process. I see a lot of Excel dashboards out in the field like this - rough but valuable in its utility.

The way the dashboarding tools are evolving, the look and feel will begin to start taking care of itself. The latest version of Excel of course has incredible graphics and built in dashboarding features. The new crop of these Do It Yourself Excel Dashboards will be interesting to study. I definitely recommend the Michael Alexander book, Excel 2007 Dashboards & Reports For Dummies.

Here’s the note - short and sweet:

Hello Dashboard Spy - Enclosed find an Excel dashboard application I made for my department after being inspired by your site.Looking arround on the internet, I found some cool stuff to make cockpits with Excel applications and this is the result. If you have any questions, just ask.

Here is the screenshot of the Excel dashboard. I’ll provide the link to the file after the “more” link. Also, I’ll link to some dashboard icons that can be used to update the look of the dashboard.

Excel Dashboard Management Summary

This Excel Management Dashboard is available for download. Feel free to leverage it for your projects.

For some free icons of incredible value to us dashboarders, see this post on The Dashboard Spy: Dashboard Icons.

Tags: Excel Dashboarding, DIY Dashboards, Do It Yourself Dashboard, Dashboard Design, Microsoft Excel Cockpit, Digital Dashboards

Related Posts on Excel Dashboards:

Learn how to create Excel dashboards.Excel Dashboard

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 “Do-It-Yourself-Dashboards-Alive-and-Well”

  1. Jon Peltier Said on March 23rd, 2008 at 11:16 am quote

    What strikes me about this dashboard is a heavy reliance on inefficient practices. The bottom right 10% of the screen is dedicated to displaying three values using dials. The thermometers in the top right also show only three values, though in less space than the dials. Perhaps both the dials and the thermometers could be replaced with line charts, so not only the latest value but also the previous week or month can be viewed.

    There is more highlighting with brignt colors than it should have: all that bright yellow in the bottom right should be white or light gray if it just means “so-so”. Also the REPT() chart in the cells in the right of the middle row of the screen suffers from an unbounded axis scale, with the displayed data spilling outside the bounds of the region set aside for the chart.

    It might be a good start, but I’d give it a B- and suggest there’s plenty of room for improvement.

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Last Modified: Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 @ 05:00

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 1:19 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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