Monthly Archives: November 2010

Excel Dashboard Tutorial

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This step-by-step Excel Dashboard Tutorial shows you how to design and implement an excel dashboard. Using a real-life case study, Chandoo walks you through the business requirement, data analysis, dashboard design and layout, pivot table construction and other aspects of the construction of this excel dashboard.

Click on this dashboard image to enlarge it:

excel dashboard tutorial

Do yourself a favor and check out this lesson on constructing an excel dashboard:

Excel Dashboard Lesson

Pay particular attention to Chandoo’s thinking about the design and layout of the excel dashboard. Also, listen for the advice he gives on the dashboard architecture decisions he makes.

Tags: How to build an excel dashboard.

Warmly, Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

The Click to Play Dashboard

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Dashboard Example: Unemployment Data Dashboard. Thanks to Dashboard Spy reader and project management ace Mike Piche of Honeywell Ltd. for spotting this innovative data visualization. I agree with you, Mike – this is one cool dashboard.

Something in particular is catching my eye. Take a quick look at this “History of Unemployment in Canada” dashboard and tell me if you see what I see.

For a hint of what I’m focusing on, think about the title of this post, “The Click to Play Dashboard”.

Unemployment Dashboard

Did you notice the “Play Triangle” in the upper left corner of the data dashboard?

Go to the actual dashboard itself at the following link and click the play button to see what happens.

Canadian Unemployment History Dashboard

Incredble, isn’t it? What a great idea. You press the play button on this data visualization and you see the graphs and metrics play out over the timeline. What a great way to get a sense of the historic trends.

Kudos to the designers of this innovative data dashboard.

Warmly,

Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

Sharepoint Dashboard for IT System Management

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Sharepoint Dashboard Example from http://dashboardsbyexample.com : Information technology System Management Dashboard.

The IT Challenge

Information technology administrators and IT support staff need easier access to key information about incident and problem resolution, change control, and its configuration management database. System Center Service Manager orchestrates activities and connects knowledge from System Center Operations Manager, System Center Configuration Manager, and Active Directory Domain Services. IT needs the ability to track this information without having access to a System Center Service Manager console.

The Solution

The System Center Service Manager 2010 Dashboard can reduce costs and improve IT responsiveness by keeping track of incidents and problem resolution, change control, and its configuration management database—with an easy to use, customizable Web interface. Because the Dashboard is built on Windows SharePoint Services, IT staff can access information without using the Service Manager console.

sharepoint dashboard for service management

I.T. service management process flow

Pick a Dashboard, Any Dashboard!

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A dashboard a day keeps the doctor away, right?

Are you involved with designing, implementing or using a business dashboard? Try this link for fun:

http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/?random

Click on that enterprise dashboard, check it out and then try the link again for another enterprise dashboard example.

Warmly,

Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

Microsoft Online Services Health Dashboard

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Users of Microsoft’s BPOS – Business Productivity Online Suite (basically a web-based version of Office, email and Sharepoint style collaboration services) can monitor the health of the online services via a dedicated Services Health Dashboard.

Microsoft BPOS service health dashboard

Upon logging into the Service Health Dashboard, administrators are presented with the status of the current day and week for all BPOS services. The status for each service or tool represented in the Service Health Dashboard is represented by one of four icons, each representing a different level of service availability.

Current day status displays the status as of the last login or page refresh. The historical status displays the greatest level of service degradation for the given day. The Additional Information, Performance Degradation, and Service Interruption icons are clickable, providing drilldown information about service status the given service and day. Clicking the Previous Week link allows administrators can navigate to historical service status for preceding weeks.

Unfortunately, it was brought out in response to an outcry following major outages.

After significant BPOS outages on Aug. 23, 2010 and Sept. 7, 2010, customers have been pressuring Microsoft to be more forthcoming about the frequency and duration of BPOS downtime. The company has been providing a modicum of insight on BPOS outages through an RSS feed, but dashboards offer a better way of disseminating more detailed information.

Tags: BPOS Dashboard, Microsoft Online Services Health Dashboard

Tour de Flex Dashboard

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Some business dashboard partners of mine were discussing RIA style applications and how very “dashboard-like” many of them can be. Our discussion branched out to flex dashboards and applications in general and the Tour de Flex project itself in particular.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Tour de Flex, it’s a cool collaboration of flex developers. The project allows developers to showcase their work by showing Flex related samples and explaining their flex components, adobe air, data integration, effects, skins and use of third party components. Over 10 million samples have been viewed.

In my opinion, the coolest part of the project is the Tour de Flex Dashboard. You really have to check out this live data dashboard. You will see live updates showing people from all around the world accessing the examples in the Tour de Flex repository. Very cool.

Click this link to see it for yourself (what follows below is merely an animated graphic – screenshot of the dashboard).

Link: Tour de Flex Dashboard

Here are some links describing the Tour de Flex dashboard and the project:

History of the Tour de Flex

The official Adobe Tour de Flex site

10 Million views of Tour de Flex

How I built the Tour de Flex server

Layout of Business Dashboards

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When it comes to the layout of business dashboards, consistency is the key to an effective design. Take the time to think about the underlying page grid and the relationship between the dashboard parts.

What elements exist on your dashboard? Define items such as portlets and gutters and horizontal dividers.

Lay out the elements, measure your parts and create html code that can control the flow of the parts in an exact manner.

Take a look at this very helpful dashboard layout guide from anychart.com. Even if you don’t use that particular technology, study it and apply the concepts.

Here is an excerpt that explains what to consider when laying out dashboard portlets:

Enterprise dashboard portlet layout