Developing Impressive Yet Insightful Excel Dashboards.
After defining your audience, preparing your data and developing mock screens for the Ms Excel dashboards what follows next is the actual development of the dashboard. The output determines if the audience intended will benefit from your analysis and be able to derive insights from the dashboard.
In this article I will take you through simple steps to ensure that you come up with a impressive yet insightful dashboards using Ms Excel. My key focus will be a HR department dashboards (see the snapshot attached).
I usually start by preparing the dashboard area where the charts and graphs will easily fit and allow user interaction through use of links, slicers and filters. The first step is to create a new worksheet, click on the view bar and deselect headings and gridlines tick marks.
The second step is to create the design layout and dashboard containers. This step will largely rely on the insert shapes option. Insert a rounded rectangle shape and draw it to fit the desired size of the dashboard and fill it with the desired color. This will form the background of the dashboard. Insert other shapes that will form as containers to the KPI’S,charts and graphs that will form the dashboard. It’s advisable to ensure that the containers have no shape fill.
Finally, it’s time to fill the dashboard with KPI’s objects, charts,pictures and graphs. As a best practice, all charts should be created using pivot charts to ensure as the data updates the charts updates accordingly. Cut and paste the chart objects from the pivot chart worksheet, ensure the charts have no fill and no outline.
This is the process I follow to create an impressive Ms Excel dashboards. In my next article, I will describe how to create interactive KPI objects which adjust according to the filter applied in the dashboard(For example Total no. of employees) and how to create impressive linking buttons for the dashboard.
Follow me on LinkedIn and find sample dashboards I have shared in my posts.
Link:https://www.linkedin.com/in/julius-wairimu-157964106/
Thank you.
