In the 29th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s impress the boss with Excel charts.
What is in this session?
Many Excel charts live a short life. They spawn in an ambitious analyst’s spreadsheet. They go to boss with literally flying colors. The boss frowns, they disappear in to recycle bin.
Don’t curse your Excel charts with short life span.
Here is a 6 step road map to help you create awesome Excel charts, everytime.
That is our topic for this podcast session.
In this podcast, you will learn
- Quick announcements about 50 ways & Einstein
- 6 step road map for charting success
- ONE: Dig your data
- TWO: Validate insights
- THREE: Pick charts that go well
- FOUR: Add title & message
- FIVE: Remove clutter
- SIX: Prompt action
- A real life example with road map in action
- Resources for creating awesome charts
Listen to this session
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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Click here to download the MP3 file.
Links & Resources mentioned in this podcast
50 ways to analyze data course:
- Join the waiting list
- Course launching on 11th of Feb
Book recommendation
- Albert Einstein – his life & universe by Walter Isaacson
Chart creation process & tips:
- Selecting right chart for your data
- Tips for creating awesome column charts
- Best charts to depict % progress
- Never use simple numbers in your dashboards
- More charting principles & chart examples
Additional resources for charting:
- Dashboard contest entries & winners – 2014, 2012, 2011, 2010
- NY Times visualization lab
- Charting tutorials & best practices from Jon Peltier
- Advanced Excel chart examples from Roberto et al
Transcript of this session:
Download this podcast transcript [PDF].
How do you impress your boss with charts?
My personal favorites are interactive charts & dashboard displays.
What about you? How do you impress your boss with Excel charts? What techniques & process you follow? Please share your thoughts and tips in comments.
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7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.