Enterprise Dashboard Digest

In recent Dashboard Spy posts, we’ve looked at the power of Microsoft Excel for business dashboards. We’ve shown you how simple it can be to embed icons and graphics into Excel dashboards. We’ve seen some pretty slick business intelligence dashboards with gauges, dials, bar charts and pie graphs. My favorite excel dashboards seem to be the ones that use spark lines.

Now it’s time to look at using KPI visualization such as meters and dials in Microsoft Access dashboards. Yes, you can actually use Access to create some visually interesting executive dashboards.

Take a look at this screenshot from an Access dashboard:

or how about this one?

Nice, right? Want to know how to create your own Access dashboard with these nifty business dashboard graphics?

Go to this post:

Using Dashboard Graphics in Access

This from the article:

Let’s face it, Access isn’t typically a tool you would think of when considering a dashboarding platform. The reporting tools in Access, as slick as they are, don’t lend themselves to visualizations.

That is, Access doesn’t offer a whole lot in the way of dashboarding graphics. Sure, it has charts and conditional formatting, but nothing like Excel.

In this post, I’ll show you a hack to spruce up your Access reporting by using your own dashboarding graphics.

A Dashboard Spy reader asked me for a Microsoft Access Dashboard.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I came across a product by OpenGate Software called Dashboard Builder for Microsoft Access.

Will update you if I learn more about the product.

This from their site:

Visual Insight to Your Access Data

A key challenge every business faces is making use of the valuable transactional data collected every day. For businesses that rely on Microsoft Access to support business operations, putting key metrics at your fingertips can be onerous and require expertise with reports and SQL queries.

Creating informative reports and metrics that you can use to make solid business decisions generally requires numerous complex stored queries or custom VB coding.

Dashboard Builder is a powerful, flexible tool for Micro- soft Access that helps you benefit from the valuable data your business collects every day. Quickly define dashboards and key metrics you want to monitor, then find the answers to critical questions that help drive your operational decisions like:

 What is the average sales price for the current month?
 How many orders you received this month versus last month?
 How many projects are over budget?

FAST DEPLOYMENT, QUICK RESULTS

Dashboard Builder is built for the average Microsoft Access user. If you are just starting out with Access Dashboard Builder provides an easy-to-understand inter- face to define key business metrics without being an expert in query creation. Experienced Access developers will appreciate the easy configuration, as well as the ability to access the full source code to enhance and modify Dashboard Builder as needed.

COMPREHENSIVE FEATURES THAT SAVE YOU TIME

Dashboard Builder offers comprehensive features for Microsoft Access that you normally find only in expensive business intelligence solutions. Instead of spending the time to create compound SQL queries and reports, Dashboard Builder gives you essential business metrics all in one place…so you can focus on what’s really important. And advanced capabilities like the ability to create dashboards for SQL Server and MySQL linked tables means your investment will pay for itself even if you decide to upsize your database platform