Grid lines provide great help in understanding values in a chart. Here is a handy trick you can use in the next bar chart to spice it up.
Here is how you can get this type of chart (we will call it a brick chart)
- First we will make a regular bar chart
- Now, let us assume we want each brick to be of 5 units width. So we take another column in the worksheet and enter the value 1 twenty times. This will be a dummy series that we will add to the chart. Just copy these 20 cells and paste them in to the chart. (just press ctrl+c after selecting the dummy value cells, and then select the chart you made in step 1 and press ctrl+v)
- Now we will change the dummy series’ chart type from bar chart to column chart. Just select the newly inserted series in the chart and right click and select chart type. In the chart type dialog, change the type.
- Now the new chart will look like this. We will adjust the secondary axis parameters so that the columns will span the entire height of the chart. Just use the format axis dialog for this.
- Once the columns are of sufficient height, we will adjust their fill color to transparent (none) and line color to white. This will produce the following effect.
- Finally, remove the unnecessary chart junk like axes and you have a neat looking brick chart.
Download the excel brick chart template and play with it.
PS: making this type of charts is slightly difficult compared to normal charts. What we have done here is, we mixed two types of charts. These are called combination charts. We will explore more about this type of charts later.
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.