Go Back to School for Excel
Dashboard Topic: Excel School
The dirty little secret in business intelligence dashboards is that sometimes (and actually more often than you think!), Microsoft Excel is a perfectly fine choice of platform for a business dashboard.
And the even dirtier secret is that we business intelligence gurus are less adept at Excel than we should be.
Is it time to go back to school for Excel?
It certainly is if the Pointy Haired Dilbert of Chandoo.org is the professor!
Yes, finally, there is a comprehensive “school for excel” – taught by a real Microsoft Excel expert!
Go to http://budurl.com/exceltutorial to see details about this amazing excel course. Here are some details:
Visit to see a 15 minute demo.
Regards
Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy
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I agree Excel has some pretty nice charting capabilities, but using it for an operational dashboard is stretching it. The first problem is the data is not automatically updated, since it’s not a database itself, nor is it set up to automatically query an operational database.
So you have a manual step to load in new data each day. Not only is this a human resource time drain, but you have multiple chances for error in the data entry, and you’re relying on that person being reliable to update the data by a certain time each day. What do you do when they want to go on vacation?
Actually you can easily link to a query or view in the database through the ODBC and then just hit refresh all to fire the query and if you’re using dynamic ranges (e.g., imbed a counta function in an offset function as a names range) for summarization in excel, it’s a one button thing. You can use the windows task scheduler to even refresh them and print to pdf or whatever – hence completely automating them.