We all know that incell charts are a very cool way to explore and visualize data. Personally I like them so much that I have written several tutorials on it here. Today we will see how a Job dashboard on “50 best cities for finding a job” originally prepared by Indeed job search engine can be recreated in Excel using In-cell charts.
The original dashboard looked like this:
We can re-create it in Excel with the following steps.
Step1 : Get the data
Of course this is very simple. I went to the web page and copied the data. Pasted it in to a text file and cleaned it up until it is ready. Then I imported the data to excel by using Import Text to Columns feature.
Step 2 : Find the symbols for Person and Employment vacancy icons
This is even more simpler. I just went to Insert > Symbol and selected “Webdings” font. The person icon is available there. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any character that looks like a chair. So I have used the computer icon (available in wingdings font).
Step 3 : Create the In-cell Chart
All we have to do is write REPT Excel Formula.
Step 4 : Add the final touches
If you look at the original chart, it also has up and down arrows to show when the ranking of the city has changed compared to previous reporting period. I have used custom cell formatting to achieve this effect. The custom formatting code used is:
[Blue]"? "0;[Red]"? "0;;
I have also adjusted the font colors and did some table formatting (like adding borders, removing gridlines etc.).
Final In-cell Dashboard of 50 Best Cities for Finding a Job
This is the final outcome
Download the Incell Dashboard on Best Cities to Find Jobs
You can download the in-cell job dashboard from here [.zip version]
Conclusions
As I said, in-cell charts are lot more fun, lot more easier to build and play with and they add variety to your dashboards, reports and general visualizations. Experiment with an in-cell chart today see if they work for you.
Further Resources on In-cell Charting & Dashboards
- Incell Bar Chart Tutorial
- Incell Sparklines Tutorial
- Incell Pie charts Tutorial
- Incell Bullet Graphs Tutorial
- Incell Dot Plots Tutorial
- Incell charts w/ Conditional Formatting
- Excel Dashboards – Tutorials, Tips and Techniques
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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.