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
Titles are an overlooked aspect of many charts. A bland title misses out on so much rich information which could be used to enhance a users understanding of the report. Here is an example of bad and good chart titles: The 2nd chart title adds additional insight and provides a much richer experience for the … 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
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