Excel Dashboard Sample: Advice about Using Excel’s Camera Tool

by Charley Kyd on November 1, 2009

Of all the Excel features that users don’t use very often, the Camera tool probably is the most powerful. This tool, also known as a Picture Link, returns a real-time image of any range in Excel.

This tool is so useful that I devoted a full chapter to it in my ebook, “Dashboard Reporting With Excel.” [click to continue...]

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Excel Dashboard Sample: Making Top-Item Charts Easier to Read

by Charley Kyd on October 31, 2009

Managers need to know where the greatest opportunities and the worst problems can be found. This is why top-item figures are so popular.

These figures typically are titled Top-Ten Reports, or 80-20 Reports. To create them, Excel users sort a category by the value of interest for each item, typically with the largest value first, and then display only the most significant values. [click to continue...]

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Excel Dashboard Sample: How to Structure Your Report Workbook

by Charley Kyd on October 29, 2009

In Excel Dashboard Sample: Weekly & Monthly Top-Ten Activity Reports I introduced two Excel dashboard reports created by Chris Helfrecht. In this post, I’ll describe a critical aspect of his report workbook: the workbook structure.

All Excel reports perform at least four tasks. Good reports assign these tasks to four sections, with specific worksheets defining each section.

The sections are: [click to continue...]

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Excel Dashboard Sample: Weekly & Monthly Top-Ten Activity Reports

October 24, 2009

When Chris Helfrecht sent these two sample Excel dashboards, he wrote that he tried to follow my methods. He also wrote that people in his company have been very enthusiastic about his new dashboards.

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Don’t Let Bad Spreadsheet Design Hurt Your Career, Part 3

October 24, 2009

I just received a dashboard report that I also need to discuss. So for the next few weeks I’ll turn into a spreadsheet critic.
Splattered Data
Imagine dropping a can of paint onto a parking lot from a 50-story building. Every car in the lot would be splattered. Randy’s workbook does the same thing with its data. [...]

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Excel Was NOT ‘Originally Designed as a Personal Productivity Tool’

October 21, 2009

If you read the business press or Business Intelligence (BI) forums, or if you listen to most IT managers, you’ll soon hear that “Excel was originally designed as a personal productivity tool.”
Well, it ain’t true!
I know this “fact” isn’t true for three reasons.

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How to Sort Data in Reports Automatically Using Excel Formulas

October 10, 2009

Many Excel reports include tables that show sorted results. Usually, these tables were sorted manually in Excel, using the Data, Sort command. However, reports would be a lot easier to maintain and update if formulas (not macros) could sort the data automatically.
There’s a simple way to do this. But to make the method work reliably, [...]

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Don’t Let Bad Spreadsheet Design Hurt Your Career, Part 2

October 5, 2009

Bad spreadsheet designs can hurt your career. I’ve seen it happen.
So in Don’t Let Bad Spreadsheet Design Hurt Your Career, Part 1, I began to discuss problems in a workbook sent to me by an Excel user I call Randy. I hope this will help you to find and fix similar problems in your [...]

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Don’t Let Bad Spreadsheet Design Hurt Your Career, Part 1

October 3, 2009

Responding to A Free Offer to Help Excel Users Improve Your Job Prospects, a reader sent me a workbook this morning. I’m glad he sent it, even though it contains no dashboards. This is because it illustrates many bad practices I’ve seen in Excel reports over the years.
I’ll call my visitor Randy.
Assuming that he created [...]

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How to Format Dates in X Axes of Mini-Charts in Excel Reports

October 1, 2009

When most Excel users create charts, they make them way too large. For many reasons, using mini-charts is much easier to read.
To illustrate, this Excel dashboard report contains 28 charts:

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