Posts tagged as:

Excel reporting

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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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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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, [click to continue...]

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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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Set Up Range Names to Connect Reports to Excel Databases, Part 3

September 1, 2009

In Excel Bug Deletes Some External Range Names Automatically I discussed a bug that exists in Excel 2007 and in the beta of Excel 2010. Here’s the summary of that entry:
When Excel range names in a report workbook reference sheet-scoped names in a database workbook, if the report workbook is opened first and the database [...]

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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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Set Up Range Names to Connect Reports to Excel Databases, Part 2

August 27, 2009

Set up references to other workbooks in your range names, not in your formulas. Formulas that use those names will be easier to use, and any problems with your links will be much easier to fix.

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Set Up Range Names to Connect Reports to Excel Databases, Part 1

August 25, 2009

When a formula in one workbook references a range in another workbook, always reference a range name, never a cell address.

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