Dashboarding Fun – Display Smileys in your excel dashboards

Dashboards are daily staple for some of us who need to report status to our bosses, present them in weekly meetings or generally CC half the world with what is up on our end.

There are several ways in which you can spice up the dashboard, one of the simple things to do is, to replace the standard Red, Green & Amber with Smileys 🙁 😐 🙂 Just follow these 3 simple steps add smileys to your dashboard.

• First create a dashboard as usual

  Of course, this is what you do everyday, so move on to next one

• Add a column to display smiley symbols

  The standard spreadsheet fonts like Arial, Verdana or Comic Sans (ahem) do not have smiley symbols as characters. You need to change the font to “Wingdings” (just select the cells, hit ctrl+shit+f to change the font), in this font, the characters JKL stand for :) :| :( respectively.

  Thus, in order to show smileys in the new column you can write a simple if formula like =IF(target < sales,"J",IF(target > sales,"L","K"))

• Finally, add conditional formatting to change the smiley color

  Select the smiley cells, and launch conditional formatting dialog to specify conditions to change the color of cell contents. For eg. red when sales < target, blue when sales > target and gray otherwise as shown below:

  

So go ahead, wow someone with a smiley dashboard.