Steven, one of our readers from England sent me a Christmas gift tracker worksheet. I found it pretty cool, so made some minor changes to it and am sharing it with you all so that you can have great time shopping for the holidays.
Why I found this Christmas Gift List Spreadsheet Cool?
There are probably a million other gift trackers out there, but I liked Steven’s version for few reasons:
- He used conditional formatting to zebra line the gift-table.
- He used array formulas to find-out who is receiving the most expensive gift. The formula relies on VLOOKUP coupled with SUBTOTAL so that when you filter the list to see gifts only for certain age group, the formula shows most expensive gift receiver in that group alone. How cool is that 😎
- He used cell formatting to highlight gifts overshooting budget in RED color.
- He used SUMPRODUCT liberally to summarize the gift data to show us “how many people got the gifts”, “how many gifts are over the budget”, “how many gifts are under-budget”.
Go ahead and download the workbook. Even if you dont have a huge list of gifts to buy this Christmas (REALLY ?!? You dont have a long list? Can I please, please get that wii?). The workbook is full of excel lessons on conditional formatting, formulas and design.
Download the Christmas Gift List Spreadsheet
Click here to download the file. It is protected to make sure you accidentally erase a formula or something. But there is no password. So go ahead and unlock it to learn something cool.
Thank you Steven,
for your most thoughtful and awesome Christmas gift to our community.
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.