For more Business Intelligence Dashboard Examples, use this link to the Dashboard Spy sitemap: Dashboard

Note: Dashboards By Example readers can get these interesting business intelligence dashboard white papers discussing the latest approaches to enterprise dashboards.

Dashboard

From a simple excel dashboard to a fully integrated enterprise reporting suite, the Business Dashboard is being quickly adopted as the new face of Business Intelligence. It has a rapidly growing role in BI reporting and analysis.

An enterprise dashboard allows at-a-glance visualization of company health and monitoring of key performance indicators. Simple to understand and high in ROI, these executive dashboards are becoming "must-haves" for all enterprises. Easy-to-use by business users and fun-to-implement by the IT department, BI dashboard projects are quickly funded and politically popular.

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"Dashboards by Example" is a business intelligence blog dedicated to showing you actual examples of do's and don'ts of dashboard design. Study examples of enterprise dashboards, scorecards and other business intelligence interfaces implemented by the world's top organizations.

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Archive for the 'excel dashboard' Category

This is an archive of the unique and controversial resource on Enterprise Dashboards known as The Dashboard Spy blog on Enterprise Dashboards. This is Volume 1 of the dashboard screenshot collection where you will find 837 dashboard screenshots of various dashboard implementations. Included in this collection are executive dashboards, enterprise dashboards, performance dashboards, corporate dashboards, balanced scorecards, BI dashboards, business intelligence dashboard - the list goes on. What is the difference between all those terms? That's part of the fun! Start studying these screenshots and learn.

Here is an interesting way to find more enterprise dashboards to study: Click this link for a random dashboard. You'll never know what dashboard you'll see next.

Excel-based Enterprise Dashboard - excel worksheet xls file download

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

Dashboard Spy Update: Several readers have recommended the Charley Kyd eBook on using Microsoft Excel for Business Dashboards. I have started reading it myself and it is excellent. There are also many excel dashboard templates available as well. Use this link: http://tinyurl.com/exceldashboard

The best way to get started in using Microsoft Excel for business dashboards is to grab an existing excel dashboard, take it apart and try it out on your own data. Here is a post that shows such a spreadsheet dashboard with a link to the xls file.

I see that many of you Dashboard Spies out there are very interested in the tried and true excel spreadsheet approach to dashboards. Thanks to a download from javaplanetinc.com, there is this excel dashboard xls file for you to play with. Here are 2 screenshots. The first shows the graphic presentation of the data. There are 2 larger sections across the top of the screen. On the left is a pie chart showing salary by department and on the right side, we have a simple listing of outstanding balances. Below this section we have 4 smaller portlets (sales by region, budget by project, current output by plant, and sales by business unit). To show you that this is straight excel, I’ve taken a screenshot of the second sheet in the workbook. Try this with your own data and see what you come up with. Remember to send us your dashboard screenshots so that we can all learn how executive dashboards apply to your business.

Business dashboard screenshot

excel-based dashboard

Homework: Don’t ignore excel as a dashboard tool. It’s graphing ability is powerful and the number of users is unmatched. If you need a refresher on the tool, see these books on excel.

Reading Assignment: Continuing on our study of the Malik book on implementing dashboards, please read this passage and think about how your company would go about choosing a dashboard vendor:

VENDOR SELECTION

There were four key criteria and feature requirements during the vendorselection process:

1. Web based for ease of access, administration, upgrades, security, andso on

2. Industry standard to ensure that experienced resources could be hired

3. Recognized and well-respected leader in the online analytical process-ing field

4. Company that spends a better than average percentage of revenues onR&D to ensure that applications remain competitive

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books.

Posted in Dashboard Screenshots, excel dashboard | 2 Comments »

If you are new to enterprise dashboards, you really must start by reading the book by Malik:

Enterprise Dashboards: Designs & Best Practices for IT

To give you a flavor of the wonderful nuggets of enterprise dashboard knowledge, here is a quote from Mr. Malik in which he talks about the SMART elements that enterprise dashboards should have:

So, let us establish the basic characteristics specific to an enterprise dashboard with a useful acronym—SMART. A dashboard must be SMART in that it contains the following underlying elements, which are essential for success:

Synergetic Must be ergonomically and visually effective for a user to synergize information about different aspects within a single screen view.

Monitor KPIs Must display critical KPIs required for effective decision making for the domain to which a dashboard caters.

Accurate Information being presented must be entirely accurate in order to gain full user confidence in the dashboard. The supporting dashboard data must have been well tested and validated.

Responsive Must respond to predefined thresholds by creating user alerts in addition to the visual presentation on the dashboard (e.g., sound alarms, e-mails, pagers, blinkers) to draw immediate user attention to critical matters.

Timely Must display the most current information possible for effective decision making. The information must be real-time and right-time. This order serves the formation of the acronym and does not indicate the relative priority of these features.

Dashboards by Example Volume 1 Goals and Objectives

"Dashboards By Example" is the theme and mission statement of this blog. We salute the Dashboard Spy in the field - those business users, project managers, IT executives, application designers, business intelligence experts, analysts, coders and subject matter experts who are on site creating this exciting and new "face of BI". Your business intelligence dashboard can go by many names - performance dashboard, executive dashboard, business dashboard, balanced scorecard, KPI metric summary, enterprise dashboard, bi dashboard, corporate dashboard. Whatever we call it, we believe that the at-a-glance visual approach is the key to user-centric design. Let's learn from each other's dashboard examples and continue to increase the level of usability and usefulness.

We strongly believe that the more dashboards you study, the more adept you will become at choosing correct design solutions for your company. "Learn by Example" is not just a motto - we take it literally, hence the name "Dashboards by Example". So take every chance you get to view examples of BI interfaces. As a matter of fact, take a second now, and study this dashboard example.

What's on your Dashboard?

The Dashboard Spy wants your dashboards!! I've collected over 1000 screenshots of business intelligence dashboards and scorecards for Volume 1 and now need you to send me the next 1000 dashboards for Volume 2. Email me at info at dashboardspy.com and tell me about your dashboard. Send me images, notes, technical details, business rules, metrics, KPIs, anything that you think your fellow Dashboard Spies will have an interest in. Keep this library of dashboarding resources going!

Also, I'd love more links to both the main Dashboard Spy site at http://dashboardspy.com and the Volume 1 blog of 1000 dashboards at http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com. I'd love your help in making these resources better known.

Looking forward to seeing your dashboards, The Dashboard Spy

P.S. Did you check out this free dashboard template for wireframing? Click on the image below for the download link and instructions. Consider it a gift for your unfailing support. Thank you very much. Sincerely, your friend in dashboarding, Hubert Lee, The Dashboard Spy.

PPS. Looking for an HTML Dashboard Template? Check out this great layout for a digital dashboard. Use this HTML template to jumpstart your front end coding.