How to resize Excel sheet – 4 ways: manual & automatic

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

How to calculate Top 10 with formulas in Excel

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

Creating custom Map Charts using shapes and VBA

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

The fastest way to create Bullet Charts

My first experience of Bullet Charts came from reading Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few in 2007.  This was the year I started to get serious with dashboards. Initially, to create Bullet Charts I used the 3 stacked bar/column charts approach.  Later, I moved to using the two-axis stacked column where possible, but in general, Read More