You’ve Got to See the Problems
To Fix the Problems! And Excel
Dashboards Deliver that Insight

The economy is going from bad to worse in most countries. But Excel dashboards offer a low-cost and effective way for managers to see trends and other patterns that can lead to the business solutions that companies need.

If this Excel dashboard showed trends about your company and industry, and you printed it full size, you'd probably see at least one unexpected pattern in your company's performance.

If six Excel dashboards about your company were arranged like this on your desk, you'd find many surprising and useful results in the two tables and 100+ charts.

by Charley Kyd, MBA
Microsoft Excel MVP

No matter where you work, no matter what you do, our worldwide financial problems will make your job more difficult…assuming you still have a job.

We don’t know what will happen with the economy in the next few years, but two things are certain about your company’s prospects.

First: If your company does find a safe path through this economic jungle, Excel users will show the way.

Excel users will do the analysis, compare the alternatives, answer the questions, and report the information that your managers need. No one else is qualified to do it.

Second: Your reporting and analysis will be wasted if your managers don’t clearly see the results of your work.

Sure, you could pile tall stacks of reports on their desks, and send them long lists of links to online information. But those displays will be wasted if your managers have to study that material to make sense of it.

If you think your managers actually will study those results, consider...

I once talked with a company president who felt buried in reports. So he moved each new report to a stack in a corner of his office. After 30 days, the stack was more than one foot (30 cm) tall. That's why he started to use dashboards.

Many managers are like that company president was; they are overwhelmed with reading and study. And, unfortunately, if you're like most Excel users, your Excel reports look something like these gray examples below.

Your gray reports and analyses might contain important information your managers need desperately. But it’s not all the information they need, and it's certainly not all the information they receive.

So when you and your co-workers bury managers in many pages of columns of numbers, your managers can’t study that information quickly, if at all.

When they're overwhelmed, managers can’t quickly understand the point of each gray report. They can't put that information into the context of other related reports. And they can't make connections, find exceptions, or notice what’s missing.

That is, they can’t turn that gray data into the insight they desperately need.

But this figure shows a more useful set of Excel reports. I created these magazine-quality reports entirely in Excel, using only Excel’s built-in features.

This type of reporting is called dashboard reporting, because the reports act like the dashboard of your car. They give your managers the ability to see a massive amount of useful information quickly.

Showing performance with many small charts creates a network effect that allows managers to see patterns of performance they might otherwise miss. See more about this below.

Yes, these reports are pretty. In fact, the IT manager of a former client once dismissed my Excel dashboard reports as “pretty-print” reports.

It's not important that they’re pretty. In fact, you can make them ugly if you want.

But these reports are critically important, because they can provide your readers with more insight – much more quickly – than any other reporting method can provide. And they can do it much less expensively than with other alternatives.

Soon, I’ll discuss the real value that reports like these can bring to your company, and to you personally. And I'll explain why the network effect, illustrated here, makes Excel dashboard reporting even more valuable.

But first, let me tell you more about the reports themselves.
 

Two Dashboard Kits to Choose From

I offer two ways to create Excel dashboard reports.

First, if you need to create a dashboard report in a hurry, you need the Plug-N-Play Dashboard Kit. You merely choose among ten report worksheet templates, enter your data, choose one of 15 color schemes, recalculate your workbook, and then print.

Second, if you want to learn how to create your own Excel dashboard reports, my Excel E-Book Kit will teach you how. It provides a 150-page e-book and 21 sample files that will teach you what you need.

Also, if you buy both kits as a bundle, you can save money and receive three bonus dashboard reports.

The Plug-N-Play Dashboard Kit

My Plug-N-Play Excel Dashboard Kit #1 is the quickest, easiest, and least-expensive way I know to get started with Excel dashboard reports.

Plug-N-Play (PNP) versions are available for both Classic Excel (97 - 2003) and New Excel (2007), and these versions also work with a Mac.

Two PNP versions are necessary because the two versions of Excel are not compatible when it comes to colors. It took me hours of work to convert one version to the other.

Each chart in each report shows 13 months of actual and targeted performance. If you don't have targets for some of your measures, just enter zero values for your target data.

To create your reports, you only need to take three general steps:

1. Choose your report design. The kit includes a report workbook with ten different report templates, each in its own worksheet. Four of the reports are shown at the right.

Some designs have tables, some don't. Some have many charts, some have fewer charts. Most are in portrait mode, but two are in landscape mode.

2. Enter your titles and data. Each chart and table in the workbook is linked to a worksheet that acts as a data-entry form. First, enter your titles for each figure. This quickly makes your report look somewhat like the final report you need. Then enter (or copy and paste) your data into the data worksheet for each figure.

If you own the Excel Dashboard E-Book Kit, you can enter the formulas I discuss in chapters 6 – 8, and that I illustrate in that kit's sample workbooks. These formulas link your dashboard workbook to your Excel database, or to other databases.

3. Choose your color schemes. The PNP kit includes fifteen color schemes, four of which are shown here. Use a simple Excel command in either the Classic or New version of Excel to apply any color scheme to your report workbook. Experiment until you find the one you like best. If you don't like a particular color in one of the color schemes, just change it.

Then print your first report, or write it to a PDF file that you can send to others.

You can follow a simple process to update your report each period. Maintaining your report workbook is easy. There are no macros to break. Nothing is hidden or protected. It's just ordinary Excel.

The Excel E-Book Kit

This figure illustrates a few of the many types of dashboard reports that you could create for your organization.

My e-book, Dashboard Reporting With Excel, teaches you how to create Excel dashboards from scratch. It doesn't discuss these reports specifically, but it does explain how to set up the charts, tables, and formatting I use to create reports like this.

The kit consists of the 150-page e-book and a package of 21 files that the book discusses. Here are its major topics:

How to Create Mini-Charts. Excel users often print charts about the size of post cards. But business magazines often print charts about the size of postage stamps. As I explain in more detail below, using many small charts in our reports gives our audience more insight more quickly than any other method of reporting. Chapter 2 of the e-book explains how to create those magazine-quality "mini-charts." And the workbooks that accompany the e-book illustrate each step along the way.

Other Useful Techniques for Dashboards. Good Excel dashboards often require additional charting techniques. In Chapter 3, I explain how to add an additional data series to a chart, how to include multiple chart types, how to overlay two charts to create special effects, how to use auto-shapes in charts, and so on. This chapter also explains why you shouldn't use gauges in dashboard reports.

1

Cash Flow

Thousands of $

As examples like this will show below, Excel dashboards can track more than financial measures

How to Create Figures that Use Both Charts and Worksheets. In dashboards, cell formatting, column widths, row heights, special formulas, and other spreadsheet elements all combine with charts to create the figures we see. Chapter 4 explains how to use these elements in your dashboard reports.

Excel's Camera Tool. This long-time Excel feature probably is the most-useful feature that most Excel users have never heard of. It gives you the ability to position live images of tables anywhere in your dashboard report. You can rotate the images and format them.

And because you even can set up a formula that determines which of several live images to display, the Camera tool allows you to include "traffic light" figures in your reports. Chapter 5 discusses the Camera tool in detail, and the sample files include working examples.

Linking Your Reports to Databases. You can set up your dashboard reports to return data from an Excel database, a PivotTable, or an Excel-friendly OLAP database. Chapter 6 discusses techniques for using Excel database and PivotTables, and it touches on techniques for using OLAPs. (If you don't use OLAP databases, just skip that section.)

Chapter 7 discusses Excel databases in detail.

How to Create an Excel Dashboard From Scratch. Chapter 8 begins with an empty spreadsheet and ends with a completed dashboard report, showing you each step along the way. The files that come with the kit include the completed dashboard, which is linked to an Excel database.

Dashboard Design Ideas. Business magazines are an excellent source for dashboard design ideas. To help you get the most from those magazines, Chapter 9 provides a wide variety of magazine figures, and shows Excel versions of those figures. The 21 files include the actual spreadsheets that duplicate the magazines' charts and tables.

Bonus Dashboard Files with the Bundle

You can save money when you buy the Plug-N-Play and E-Book kits together. When you do so, you also receive the three bonus dashboard reports shown here.

The top report is based on a design that Business Week used in the early 1990s to describe economic performance for the week. I changed it to show Performance for the Month.

The middle file is based on a design that Forbes magazine used in the 1990s, also to display economic performance. I turned it into an Executive Overview.

This dashboard is unusual because it uses only one chart. However, notice that it contains seven short tables, each of which summarizes key information that could serve as a reference for managers.

Let me reassure you that it doesn't matter what your numbers and text represent. You could use pages like this to report customer traffic, car traffic, or astronomical observations. Excel doesn't care. As 14 numbered examples show on this web page, dashboard reports aren't limited to financial and marketing information.

The bottom file also is unusual. It displays 110 charts on one printed page.

This is the only workbook in either kit that contains a macro. First you format the top-left chart any way you want. Then you run the well-commented macro to create the remaining charts. Each chart gets its data from another data set in the workbook.

Judge the Value of These Excel Dashboards for Yourself

A high-paid marketing consultant recently advised me to attach a dollar value to each of the many benefits that Excel dashboards offer, and then compare the total value to the cost of these products.

“With such a high return on their investment, and with no risk,” he said, “they’d be fools not to buy.”

Unfortunately, it’s impossible for me to follow his advice, for a simple reason:

2

Cycle Time Per Run

Seconds

Track operating measures

In the few years since I wrote my e-book, Dashboard Reporting With Excel, people in more than half the countries in the world have purchased my dashboard products. Many of them work for one-person companies, and many others work for some of the largest companies in the world. Most work for businesses, but many work for government agencies, for police departments, universities, military organizations, libraries, foundations, the UN, and so on. And some are unemployed.

I can’t possibly specify a dollar value that these products bring to so many different people with so many different needs. Therefore, I’m going to ask for your help.

The paragraphs below offer five key benefits that Excel dashboard reporting brings to many organizations, and five benefits they bring to Excel users themselves. As you read, please estimate the value that each benefit contributes to your organization, or to you personally.

(These estimated values are intended only for you, by the way. No one else will see them.)

Also keep in mind that there’s no risk. I offer a full refund to any customer who requests it within one year after purchase. Only about 1% of my customers have taken me up on this offer, so the chances are pretty good that you’ll like what you see.

How Your Company Benefits from Using Excel Dashboards

There are many ways that Excel dashboard reporting can benefit your company. Here are five that are significant in these challenging economic times.

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Repeat Customers

Rolling 12 Months

Track marketing measures

1. Quicker Insight

Small charts communicate much more quickly and easily than numbers do. This is because of the way our eyes and brains work.

When we look at something, our eyes take tiny snapshots that our brains transform into meaning. Because our eyes take about ten snapshots a second, our brains don’t store each snapshot; if they did, our minds would be overwhelmed with images. Instead, the real world acts as our short-term visual memory.

Therefore, when we try to make sense of a column of numbers, our eyes could churn through the same list of numbers many times, working to build a meaningful pattern in our brains. Our eyes and brains must work hard to find a pattern in numeric data.

On the other hand, consider what happens when we look at small charts like those we use in Excel dashboards. In one or two of those tiny snapshots we can see the entire pattern of performance. This pattern is infinitely clearer on paper or on screen than it would be if it were only in our minds. We therefore see the pattern more easily, understand it more quickly, remember it far longer, and -- this is key -- we can compare it more easily the performance shown in other charts.

Even if readers study reports that contain only numbers, they'll miss critical patterns in data from different sources in reports that arrive at different times. But readers of Excel dashboard reports can see critical patterns easily with a few quick glances at the reports.

To value the time-saving benefit in dollars (or Euros, or British pounds, or whatever), you'll need to mentally perform a simple calculation.

4

Headcount

Team Members

Track Human Resources measures

First estimate the average number of hours of reading time that each dashboard report could save your average reader. Multiply by the expected number of readers for each of your dashboard reports. Multiply by the potential number of reports per year. Finally, multiply by the average pay rate per hour for your audience.

Alternatively, make your best guesstimate for the total value of this category, and then enter your value here:

2. Significantly More Insight

Think about all the reports and analyses that your managers and co-workers receive each month. Roughly what percent of the potential insight do your people actually absorb from those reports?

5

Oil Consumption

bbl per Month

Track measures for key commodities

If you’re brutally honest with your estimate, you’ll probably come up with a very small percentage. There are at least three reasons that your managers and co-workers absorb so little information.

Reason 1: Most people don’t like to read reports with a lot of numbers in them.

Some people save the reports until a later time that never comes. Others skim the reports until they can really study them, which they seldom do. And others just throw the reports away at their earliest opportunity.

People can’t find insight in reports they never read.

Reason 2: It’s virtually impossible for readers to discover important patterns of performance in reports that contain many pages of columns of numbers.

People could spend many hours studying reports that look like tax tables, and fail to find key patterns in the data, patterns that could lead to success or failure.

Business insight is largely a matter of seeing patterns in performance.

Reason 3: Most importantly, pages of columns of numbers provide virtually no context for the information they contain.

This is a problem because context often is the most important factor in business reporting and analysis.

Example: Suppose your profits have increased slightly. This would be horrible news if your market is booming and your competitors’ profits are skyrocketing. But this would be great news if your market has crashed and your competitors are going bankrupt. It all depends on the context.

Example: Suppose your customers are requesting slightly more refunds than they normally do. This would be horrible news if the quality of your product or service has declined. But it would be great news if most of your customers are filing for bankruptcy and they’re desperate for cash. It all depends on the context.

The context is obvious in both examples, but the point is clear:

Performance patterns without relevant context are like charts with no labels. They’re impossible to interpret correctly.

How Excel Dashboards Add Value

Excel dashboard reporting solves these problems in three ways.

First, your managers and co-workers actually will read your dashboard reports. This often is half the battle.

Second, Excel dashboard reports allow your readers to see many more measures, more clearly, than they see when they study many pages of columns of numbers.

Third, and most important, Excel dashboards provide rich context. That is, they allow readers to find patterns by comparing the charts to each other.

This ability to find meaningful patterns in groups of charts is where things really get interesting!

If you compare 8 charts to each other in pairs, you see 28 additional patterns. This network effect isn't possible in standard Excel reports.

Leveraging the Network Effect

If you look for patterns of performance in each of the 8 charts in this figure, and you think of each chart as an isolated figure, you'll look for insight only among those 8 individual charts.

But if you also search among every unique pair of charts, you could see as many as 28 additional patterns of performance. These patterns could provide significantly more insight into your company's performance. When applied only to pairs of charts, this is called the "network effect".

The calculation is simple. If n is the number of Excel charts that a reader can see in the dashboards arranged on her desk, and she looks for useful patterns in pairs of charts, then she can she n(n-1)/2 unique pairs of charts. To illustrate, if she can see 100 charts, there are 100*99/2, or 4,950 unique pairs.

However, if she looks for patterns among more than a pair of charts, the number of combinations increases significantly. For example, if she compares all combinations of 2, 3, or 4 charts, she'll have access to more than 4 million unique combinations.

Of course, from a practical standpoint, your readers won't examine the millions of possible combinations of charts among the 100 charts that you might give them. But their ability to do so creates a much richer reporting environment, which can bring real insight to your business:

• “These measures are improving,” a manager might say, “and these are falling like a rock. Why is this happening? What can we do about it? And what more do we need to know?”
   
• "Look at this chart, that chart, and the last two charts over there," a manager might say. "Taken together, they show performance that makes no sense at all. I want you to check your data. If those charts are right, we've got some real problems."
   
• "Don't be concerned about our performance in this chart," a manager might say. "That's not the problem. This is the problem down here. If we could turn this measure around, and if we can bring these two measures back to normal, then most of our other performance problems would just go away." 

By the way, if you enjoy playing with numbers, you might like to know that there are 1,267,650,600,228,230,000,000,000,000,000 unique combinations of any number of charts, from 1 to 100.

But if you have only about six charts in a display, as many of the expensive dashboard products do, there are a total of only 63 unique combinations. So even when we compare alternative dashboards at their ridiculous extreme, it's obvious that Excel dashboards offer a much richer reporting environment, and for a lot less money.

Giving your managers much richer performance insight delivers real value to your company, but that value is difficult to estimate in dollars. What’s the dollar value of finding a small problem before it grows large? Or the value of discovering a small opportunity while there’s still time to act on it? Or the value of discovering long-standing errors in your source data, errors that stand out only when you compare that data to related data?

Please make your best estimate, and then we’ll move on.

3. Report Data from Any Source

Most systems for reporting and analysis (those expensive systems supported by your IT department) have at least two problems with their sources of data.

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Vehicle Usage

Tons, Rolling 12 Months

Track materials handling measures

The first problem is that those systems get their data from a data warehouse. If you work in a small company, your accounting database probably is the only data warehouse you have. If you work in a large company, your data warehouse could contain data from a wide variety of sources.

In all companies, however, four things are almost always true about IT's data warehouse:

1. Internal data that would be very useful won’t be added to the data warehouse any time soon.
    
2. Useful external data (about markets, the economy, competitor performance, key commodity prices, interest rates, and so on) probably will never be added to the data warehouse.
    
3. If you absolutely, positively must add a new source of data in the next few days, you’ll be lucky to get it in the next few months.
    
4. Whatever changes you make will be expensive.

The second problem with those expensive systems is that most of them can report data from only one query at a time. So if you want to compare the sunny days in May with the number of workers who called in “sick” in May, you probably won’t be able to do it in one report.

On the other hand, Excel dashboards can report data from any source, and they can do it on one page. They even could report the data in one chart on one page.

If the data is available electronically, you typically can bring it into a spreadsheet easily. If it’s available only on paper, you’ll need to key it into your spreadsheet. But one way or the other, usually in less than an hour, you can get your data into a spreadsheet and then into your Excel dashboard.

This ability to use any data in your reports offers real value, but the value can vary significantly by organization.

• If you worked for a US financial institution that has failed recently, your company might have saved billions of dollars and still be in business if your managers had paid closer attention to key measures of risk in your industry and in the economy.

  7

  Products Returned

  Units

  Track product quality measures

  (The Wall Street Journal reports that gross leverage ratios, a common measure of financial risk, grew quickly for major investment banks for several years before the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.)
   

• If you work for a police department, tracking crime statistics, unemployment rates, factory shift schedules, and the amount of precipitation – all by geographic region – could uncover new crime patterns, a discovery that could save lives.
   
• If you work for a large furniture retailer I know about, you build new stores only in regions where an unrelated consumer product sells particularly well. This is because your sales are highly correlated with the sales of that product. You therefore carefully monitor that product's sales by region, which you find in standard statistics about its industry.

4. Use Agile Reporting

The world is changing quickly, and the changes come faster every day. If your organization doesn’t stay ahead of the changes, it could be left far behind.

To stay ahead of the changes – or merely to keep up – you continually must look at new data and at old data in new ways. You must concentrate on new potential problems and opportunities while setting aside other time-consuming issues that are less important in the current environment.

That is, your reporting must become significantly more agile than it is today.

This can be difficult to do if you rely entirely on a typical, and expensive, Business Intelligence system. Business professionals (“users”) typically can change BI reports and screens in minor ways. But you’ll probably need to get programmers involved to make the other changes you often need. And that level of effort typically requires meetings, negotiations, delays, and even more meetings.

But there’s seldom any problem like this with Excel dashboards, because programmers never need to be involved. If the data is available, Excel users typically can have sample reports done in less than a day.

8

Dealers

Avg # per Month

Track measures about sales channels

In fact, the Plug-N-Play reports in the dashboard kit allow you to generate a new dashboard report in only a few hours. All you do is to enter your labels, copy and paste your data, recalculate by pressing F9, and then print.

5. Low-Cost Reporting

Commercial software for business reporting and analysis can be very useful. But it’s expensive! It’s expensive to buy; it’s expensive to maintain; and it’s expensive to learn.

Commercial software also can be expensive to use. When managers and executives take the time to explore company data themselves – as the software vendors encourage them to do – those managers are acting as high-paid analysts, not as leaders and decision-makers.

On the other hand, your company already owns and uses Excel. It’s already paid for. In terms of additional software cost, Excel reporting and analysis is free.

9

Inventory Days

Track inventory control  measures

By comparing purchase costs for the two alternatives, you'll find that Excel dashboard reporting adds even more value:

• If you’re thinking about buying an expensive business reporting system, you probably could buy fewer licenses, or postpone the purchase, if you start to use Excel dashboard reporting first.
   
• If you already own an expensive business reporting system, you might be able to give up some licenses, which could reduce your annual maintenance costs significantly.
   
• If your executives and other managers surf your company’s data rather than doing real managerial work, Excel dashboards could free up many hours of their time every week.

Total Company Benefits

(I repeat that no one else will see these values. They're only for your benefit.)

The Personal Benefits of Using Excel Dashboards

Because Excel dashboard reporting offers so much value and because it costs so little, most managers are happy to reimburse employees for purchasing my dashboard kits. Generally, therefore, my products cost you nothing personally.

Additionally, I give you my permission to make one extra copy of your purchases. If your company pays, you can keep a copy for yourself. If you pay, you can use one copy for your company. (But you don’t have permission to distribute copies of the original material to other employees or to clients. Instead, ask about my quantity discounts.)

In addition to getting a free copy, here are other ways that my dashboard kits can benefit you personally:

1. Enhance Your Resume

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Resumes Received

Monthly Totals

Track measures about labor markets

Nearly every corner of the world is having economic problems. Large companies are closing their doors. Lenders are terrified. Many companies are announcing lay-offs. Some cities and counties are going bankrupt. And some national governments plan to nationalize large financial institutions.

In other words, even if your job seems secure today it’s a good idea to keep your resume up-to-date.

When I worked as a small-company CFO, hiring good new employees was always a challenge. For each job, I would start with a tall stack of resumes and scan them quickly. I looked for any excuse to move each resume into either the No pile or the Maybe pile. Most of them hit the No pile.

When I went back through the Maybe pile, I usually decided to interview two types of people. Mostly, I interviewed people who seemed to have the specific skills and knowledge I was looking for. But also, I interviewed people who intrigued me. These people had skills and knowledge that might turn out to be quite valuable, even if they weren’t an exact match for the job.

If you include an Excel dashboard report with your resume you’ll probably intrigue many potential employers and increase your chance of getting an interview.

If Excel is part of the job description, your dashboard will illustrate your Excel skills like no amount of certification can. If you manage Excel users, you would demonstrate your ability to bring positive changes to your new employer. And also, a brief discussion about the benefits of specific Excel dashboard reports you’ve created could launch a discussion about unique skills and knowledge that you could bring to a new employer.

However, you need to be able to follow through on the promise implied when you include an Excel dashboard with your resume. That is, you’ll need to be able to produce Excel dashboard reports when you’re asked to do so.

2. Improve Your Job Security

11

Reports Generated

Per Recipient

Track administrative measures

If you produce Excel dashboard reports for your managers and co-workers, you probably reduce your chance of being laid off in the first place. There are at least three reasons for this.

One reason is obvious. If the choice comes down to laying off Joe or Sally, and Sally produces those great Excel dashboard reports that everyone likes so much, then, well, goodbye Joe.

The second reason could be even more important to your career. To produce good dashboard reports you need to understand the problems and opportunities that your managers and co-workers face.

When managers explain their information needs to you, when they explain the patterns they hope to find in their data, they’re teaching you how to add value to your organization. And when you ask questions about their information needs, or when you make good suggestions and dumb ones, the answers you receive teach you even more about how to make your organization succeed.

That is, if you work to produce good Excel dashboard reports – ones that bring real insight to your managers and co-workers – you’re more likely to become the knowledgeable and thoughtful employee that managers fight hard to keep.

The third reason is most important of all. By helping your managers and co-workers to improve your company's performance, you could reduce the chance that your company would need to lay people off in the first place.

3. Reduce Spreadsheet Hell

Working with ordinary spreadsheets often requires a lot of busywork. You import data, you sort it, you transform it, you search for errors, and you finally analyze and report it. Then, in a day, or a week, or a month, you do it all over again.

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King County Employment Level

Thousands

Track regional economic measures

This busywork often is called “Spreadsheet Hell”. (Some people call it “Excel Hell”. But we had the same problems with Lotus 1-2-3, and with VisiCalc before that. So the problem isn’t unique to Excel.)

Spreadsheet Hell creates at least two problems for Excel users. First, it hurts your efficiency, which makes it more difficult to please your boss. Second, living in Spreadsheet Hell is HARD WORK! It takes all the fun out of using Excel.

My Excel e-book kit teaches a simple technique that avoids many of the problems that cause Spreadsheet Hell. When you use Excel dashboards, you typically maintain your data in one or a few simple spreadsheet databases, then use spreadsheet formulas to pull just the numbers you need into your dashboard report.

You test for errors in the same way. That is, you can set up error-finding formulas in your dashboard report, formulas that are something like this:

=IF([Error Found],”ERROR!!”,””)

Here, “[Error Found]” represents any formula that returns TRUE when an error exists, otherwise it returns FALSE. So when an error is found, this formula returns “ERROR!” to your report, and when no error is found, the formula returns “”; that is, it returns an empty string that makes the formula invisible to readers.

You can use the same formula-driven methods to create your other reports and analyses. Each period, you add new data to your Excel database workbook(s). Then you open last period’s report workbooks, change their dates to the current date, and then recalculate (by pressing F9) to bring the new into your reports and analyses.

If you work for a large organization, you’re probably concerned that you’ll quickly outgrow your spreadsheet databases. If so, you’ll be happy to know that I designed Excel dashboard reports to use data from Excel-friendly OLAP products, like IBM’s TM1 and PARIS Technologies’ PowerOLAP.

If you don’t know what OLAP is, don’t worry about it. Just know that when the time comes you can upgrade some or all of your Excel databases to a server-based system, and then easily adapt your existing Excel dashboard reports to use that system.

4. Learn More About Excel

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Electrical Consumption

Million kWh

Track measures of energy usage

New Excel users often complain, “I’ll never learn it all!” That’s true, they won’t. NOBODY will ever learn everything there is to know about Excel!

Instead, we Excel users tend to learn what we need, when we need it. And then we apply that new knowledge to new business problems that we can solve with Excel.

My Excel dashboard material teaches you more about Excel in two ways. First, it teaches you things you might not know about Excel. It teaches you about mini charts, Excel databases, the Excel Camera object, new ways to use range names, ways to manage colors, and so on. This is information that you can use in your other Excel work.

Second, it teaches you new ways to use what you already know about Excel. It’s sort of like a guest who visits your own kitchen, and uses the ordinary food in your own refrigerator, and the few spices in your own cupboard, and then prepares a feast like you’ve never had before.

In other words, with its e-book, its many sample applications, and with its Plug-N-Play dashboard reports, my dashboard material teaches you new and practical ways to cook with Excel.

5. Have More Fun!

I know, we Excel users are supposed to be serious about our jobs. We’re paid to report and analyze and make decisions on the basis of cold, hard facts. We’re paid to work with numbers, and to make decisions that could make or break our company, and our careers. And we bring years of training and experience to these very serious jobs. Yes, indeed, we’re very serious people.

And yet, the dirty little secret about creating Excel dashboards is that it’s fun to do! It’s fun to finally produce some good-looking output from Excel. It’s fun to have your managers and co-workers look at your reports with enthusiasm...perhaps for the first time ever!

And it’s fun to tape your dashboard reports to the wall of a conference room and see your team members huddled around them, discussing performance and ideas that are critical to the success of your company. (If you’ve not had this experience, you should try it sometime!)

To give you some idea about how much fun these dashboards can be, glance through the notes from Excel dashboard users at the right of this page. These notes are from serious people, with series titles, working for serious companies. But notice how often these serious people use exclamation marks when they talk about their dashboards. They’re having fun with Excel dashboards!

14

Giggles

Average per Day

Track any measure for which you have data

I won’t ask you to estimate a dollar value for this category. That would be as ridiculous as the measure shown here.

Besides, if you quickly add up the dollar (or Euro or British pound or whatever) values you’ve entered for the other nine benefits, I’m sure the total value will far exceed the cost of a dashboard kit, which is shown in the table below.

Now's the Time to Act

Even if you work for a company that's doing well right now, your managers still are scrambling. They're looking for the best ways to avoid the downturn, or to take advantage of the opportunities they see.

In either case, your managers need the insight that Excel dashboards can bring. They need that insight today! 

And in defense of your own career, you probably need the benefits that your knowledge of Excel dashboards can bring. At the very least, creating Excel dashboards will make you stand out from the crowd in a good way; and that's a smart tactic in tough economic times.

But you can't get started with Excel dashboards until you place your order. Do your company and yourself a favor, and get started today.

Choose the Dashboard Package That's Right for You

Click on the button with the features that are best for you.

If you use Windows or Vista, choose the version of Excel you use. If you use Mac Excel 2008, choose the Excel 2007 version. If you use earlier versions of the Mac, choose the Excel 97-2003 version.

If you don't already have Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader, you can download a FREE copy here. You'll probably use it a lot. To open the Zipped version, you'll need to install a program like WinZip. You can download a free copy here.

Here's some additional information about ordering:

• Privacy protection against identity theft.
• About the author.
• How does an "e-book" differ from a printed book?
• Satisfaction guarantee and refund policy.

If you have any problems downloading or un-zipping the files, contact me immediately. I'll make sure to get you what you need.