Dashboards are very common business monitoring tools, but creating them in excel with all the bells and whistles is not so easy. So here is a quick 1-2-3 on how to do it.
Lets take a sample of 2 consecutive year sales figures for 7 regions. The colums have Region name, 2004-05, 2005-06 figures and finally YoY Growth percentages. The lame dashboard should look something like this:
But may be we can make it little better. Ideally, a person looking at this would like (to know) the following things:
- What are the things that are going up / down / remaining constant
- The chart should look simple and not cluttered; meaning, there cant be multiple columns to present information. He/she should be able to look at one column and concluded something
- May be little graphics wont hurt the presentation while retaining the information.
So, a cool dashboard would look something like the below one:
Well, how to get it in 3 steps?
- Type the following formula in the cell F5 and drag it to apply to all the cells
[Click on the image to see bigger version of the formula] - Select the range F5:F11, goto Format->Conditional Formatting and enter the following values there:
[Click on the image to see bigger version of the formula] - Finally, if its already not, change the font of the worksheet to Arial, (see those arrow marks, they are not available in all fonts. And btw, if you dont know how to insert them in the formula use Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Character Map and then locate the symbols.)
So, go ahead and impress everyone with the cool dashboards.
13 Responses to “Data Validation using an Unsorted column with Duplicate Entries as a Source List”
Pivot Table will involve manual intervention; hence I prefer to use the 'countif remove duplicate trick' along with 'text sorting formula trick; then using the offset with len to name the final range for validation.
if using the pivot table, set the sort to Ascending, so the list in the validation cell comes back alphabetically.
Hui: Brillant neat idea.
Vipul: I am intrigued by what you are saying. Please is it possible to show us how it can be done, because as u said Hui's method requires user intervention.
Thks to PHD and all
K
Table names dont work directly inside Data validation.
You will have to define a name and point it to the table name and then use the name inside validation
Eg MyClient : Refers to :=Table1[Client]
And then in the list validation say = MyClient
Kieranz,
Pls download the sample here http://cid-e98339d969073094.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/data-validation-unsorted-list-example.xls
Off course there are many other ways of doing the same and integrating the formulae in multiple columns into one.
Pls refer to column FGHI in that file. Cell G4 is where my validation is.
Vipul:
Many thks, will study it latter.
Rgds
K
[...] to chandoo for the idea of getting unique list using Pivot tables. What we do is that create a pivot table [...]
@Vipul:
Thanks, that was awesome! 🙂
@Playercharlie Happy to hear that 🙂
Great contribution, Hui. Solved a problem of many years!
Thanks to you, A LOT
Hi Hui,
Greeting
hope you are doing well.
I'm interested to send you a private vba excel file which i need to show detail of pivot in new workbook instead of showing in same workbook as new sheet.
Please contact me on muhammed.ye@gmail.com
Best Regards