Posts tagged as:

Excel Dashboards

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: Weekly & Monthly Top-Ten Activity Reports

by Charley Kyd on 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. [click to continue...]

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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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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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