Dashboard

Today’s Dashboard Design Tip from the Dashboard Spy: Showing Images in Excel with a Web 2.0 Flair!

Excel dashboards can use the Lightbox image technique so popular with blogs and websites these days. Have you seen the effect where you click on an image or a link to a form and the new content pops up in front and the underlying page dims to a dark gray or black? That’s called lightboxing.

Thanks to the always innovative dashboard experts at Juice Analytics who wrote the post, Lightboxing Images in Excel, we get this Excel Dashboard xls file (right click and save xls file) and accompanying image media.jpg (right click and save to root of C drive). Download those files to see the following effect:

Here is the Excel dashboard:

When you click on the “Show” button, the speadsheet dims and the following image appears on top of the excel dashboard. To dismiss the image, you would click on it.

The lightbox javascript is called Lightbox2 and is maintained by Lokesh Dhakar.

Be sure to visit the Juice Analytics post to read more about this lightboxing technique in Excel.

PS. Have you seen the latest Dashboard Videos on dashboards.tv?

Tags: Excel Dashboard, Images in Dashboards, Business intelligence dashboard design

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

2 Responses to “Lightbox Images on Excel Dashboards”

1. Antiaffliction Said on October 12th, 2009 at 3:09 am quote

   Hi,

   Please help.

   The sample files work perfectly, but as soon as I try to replicate it in Excel 2007 it doesnt work all that well.

   The background shading does not appear and the buttons do not hide themselves when displaying the lightbox images.

   Your comments or suggestions would be higly appreciated.

   Thank you,

   Ruoall Chapman

2. Paul Said on February 14th, 2010 at 4:16 am quote

   You’ll need to enable macros in the trust centre

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Last Modified: Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 @ 13:07

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 2:26 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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