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Windows or Mac, Excel 2007 through 2013

Create Professional Dashboard Reports in Excel

Excel dashboard reports provide more information with less reading time and effort than standard reports or BI displays.
And they offer much greater flexibility at a much lower cost!

by Charley Kyd
Microsoft Excel MVP

One of 20 Excel dashboard reports included in IncSight DB, Version 2. Pages in this set use several chart sizes and can include tables. This figure uses the default color theme for DB.

Be sure to add your name to your dashboard. This lets your readers know whom to call with questions and compliments.

Another of the Excel dashboard reports in IncSight DB, Version 2. This figure uses the second color theme included with DB2.

(If you use Excel 2003 or before, see How to Quickly Create & Update Professional Dashboard Reports in Excel 2003 & Before.)

Do most of your Excel reports look somewhat like these gray examples?

If so, your managers and other readers must work hard to transform those numbers into useful insight. But your Excel reports don't have to be that way. They could be easy to read and understand.

The figures below show dashboard reports created entirely with Excel. Professional-quality reports like these work somewhat like the dashboard of your car. At a glance, your readers can easily review a massive amount of data, quickly discover patterns of performance in the data, and easily remember what they've seen.

Excel users in more than half the countries in the world use Excel templates like these to create reports for their clients, co-workers, managers, or investors. You can do the same with your own reports.

Of course, if there's something you want to change about these reports, you can do so easily. This isn't complex software. No macros are needed. It's only Excel.
 

High-Quality Reports

These reports look like they came from the pages of a business magazine, or from the business graphics department of a high-priced consulting firm. Unless you tell your managers, they probably won't guess that you created the reports in Excel.

As Excel users, our purpose is to communicate business information clearly and quickly. Our purpose is not to impress our audience with pretty pictures.

Therefore, these reports avoid chart junk...the distracting eye candy that many commercial dashboard companies add to their expensive dashboard systems. This is why my reports don't include gauges, 3D images, or other visual toys that act as a speed bump to undertanding. Instead, these reports are designed to clearly show information that your audience needs.
 

Fast-Updating Reports

Well-designed Excel dashboard reports offer two important benefits; one is for people who read the reports, the other is for Excel users who prepare them.

Readers get simple, professional-quality reports. This feature is important because the reports will make it easy for your readers to get more information, more quickly, than any other reporting format can provide.

And Excel users get dynamic updating, which means quick and easy reporting. Here's how...

You can update these reports quickly because they typically contain no data! Instead, they contain only a few settings, along with formulas linked to data worksheets in separate workbooks.

When it's time to update your reports, you...

1. Add new data to a column in each data worksheet (your Actual and Target worksheets, for example).
    
2. Update a date value in one cell of your report.
    
3. Recalculate your workbook. (If Automatic Calculation is set, this happens automatically. Otherwise, you press F9.)

Any number of DB2 and QnE2 reports can link to the same data worksheets. This means that you update your data worksheets once and then use them in any number of dynamically updated reports.

This reporting strategy can...

• save you many hours of work each month, because all reports benefit from the one data update.
   
• improve the accuracy of your reports, because all reports get their data from the same few data worksheets.

I designed these reports to avoid Worksheet Hell. The reports all link to two simple data worksheets. One contains actual performance data, the other contains target data. (If you don't need target data, just enter zeros for your targets.)

Inexpensive Reports

Because these templates offer such great value, I originally planned to charge hundreds of dollars for them. But I decided to lower the price so that as many people as possible can generate their own Excel dashboard reports.

But charging hundreds of dollars would have been a bargain, because...

• Commercial dashboard software typically costs tens of thousands of dollars and takes many days to set up. But my reports provide more information per report than the expensive systems, and my reports are easier to read.
   
• Custom Excel dashboard reports of this quality could cost thousands of dollars for just a few reports. But IncSight DB, Version 2, includes twenty report designs for a very low price.
   
• None of the expensive solutions would allow you to generate your first reports in a few hours, and modify them easily. But you can do that with my reports.
   
• None of the expensive solutions would teach you Excel techniques that you could use with your other Excel reports. But that's exactly what IncSight DB2 and its 25 pages of documentation allow.

This package offers significant benefits that the expensive systems lack. However, instead of thousands of dollars, or even hundreds of dollars, I've set the price at about $3.00 per report.

Get started today and distribute your first Excel dashboard report by tomorrow!

			Set up your first Excel dashboard report in less than an hour. Add any number of reports. You can update your reports in seconds because they're linked to an Excel database. Choose from 20 Excel templates, plus 2 color schemes. These dashboards use only Excel workbooks. Nothing is hidden or protected. There are no macros to run. And there's nothing to install. Order now to take advantage of the introductory price!   IncSight DB, Version 2 for New Excel, Introductory Price: —PC Excel 2007 and after: —Mac Excel 2008 and after: $79.00 $49 USD (If you use Excel 2003, see IncSight DB, Version 1) Availability: Guarantee: Licensing: Instant download. One-year, unconditional. One work copy plus one personal copy.
			FREE! Included with today's order... 1. IncSight Colors, Set 1a. Get 30 custom Office color themes designed for Excel dashboards. A $29 value. 2. Charley's Swipe Files. Get chart figures 1-4 -- with instructions -- that begin the Charley's Swipe Files subscription. This is a $41.80 value if you were to order the charts individually, or $25.90 value if you were to subscribe to Charley's Swipe Files.

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