Titles are an overlooked aspect of most charts. Bland titles miss out on so much rich information that could enhance a user’s understanding. So, in this post, we look at how to create dynamic chart titles in Excel. Here is an example of bad and good chart titles: Hopefully, you agree the second chart provides a … Read more
Having looked at how to use slicers with PIVOTBY and FILTER in a previous post. Let’s take this a step further and discover how we can use Table slicers for more advanced user interactivity. Table of Contents Example Getting the table slicer selections Changing and applying table slicer selections Disconnected slicers Slicer selections LAMBDA Conclusion … Read more
Often as Excel users, we can look across at Power BI and see the convenience of having a sharable web-based dashboard. It’s nice to have each person viewing a dashboard without affecting other users. We don’t have anything similar in Excel… or do we? Normally, if we share an Excel Workbook saved in OneDrive or … Read more
This post looks at how to Resize an Excel sheet. It’s a common requirement for users and is especially useful when creating dashboards for different-size monitors. Every office I have ever worked in has been an equipment battleground. It didn’t matter what the equipment was; it just had to be better than everybody else. A new keyboard, … Read more
Top 10 lists are a common form for displaying information, especially on dashboards and summarized reports. It is easy to create a top 10 in Excel when working with sorted data; just cell link to the top 10 items in the list… easy! It’s also relatively simple when using AutoFilter, Tables, and PivotTables, as it … Read more
Checkboxes placed onto the face of the worksheet are an excellent way for users to interact with a spreadsheet. Each checkbox can be linked to a cell, so that when clicked the value in the cell changes between TRUE and FALSE. But if you have a lot of checkboxes to create it becomes a real … Read more
Whenever I see promotional images for expensive BI Dashboard software, they always show the same thing – a map with countries or regions highlighted in different colors. It sends the subtle message that maps are the pinnacle of Business Intelligence (whether they are or not is a different matter altogether). Until Excel 2016, these Map … Read more
In this post, I would like to consider the use of colors in a dashboard (or, for that matter any analysis tool which uses colors to highlight areas of interest). Everybody believes they have good taste, even though everybody has different tastes. When choosing colors for a dashboard the key consideration is not your taste … Read more
In this post, I would like to pick up the example we looked at last week. We saw that it is possible to highlight specific values in a bar chart. This makes it very easy for the reader to see the key information quickly. In this post, we will consider a similar goal, but for … Read more
Sometimes in a chart we want to highlight certain bars so the reader can quickly see the important information. An example would be to highlight our company when it is compared with its competitors (see the chart below). In this chart, it is very easy to see how Fox Books compares to its competitors. There … Read more