From the category archives:

Reporting

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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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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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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Excel charts, seasonality, & analysis: Five lessons from the WSJ

September 23, 2009

In my tiny town on the Washington coast, I don’t get the Wall Street Journal until it arrives in our mail box about noon most weekdays. So at breakfast this morning I read an article in yesterday’s Journal, which offers some great advice for Excel users in business.
Don’t get me wrong. The article, New Light [...]

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How to Show Subtotals in a Sorted Excel Database

August 31, 2009

Just after I finished How to Report and Analyze Variable-Length Databases in Excel a visitor asked how to use formulas to show subtotals in a sorted list. From her description, she wants to do something like this:

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How to Report and Analyze Variable-Length Databases in Excel

August 28, 2009

Andrew Bates left a comment in Set Up Range Names to Connect Reports to Excel Databases, Part 1, asking how to report and analyze variable-length data. The problem he describes is really common. I used to have it a lot when I worked with data exported as text files and imported into Excel. But once [...]

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