Long time PHD reader and mother of a lovely kid, Michelle, sent me a question in email that provoked me to write this post,
I was wondering how to tabulate large amount of information gathered through surveys. Where I work customers are constantly handed survey sheets in order for us to measure how the service -among other things- is being perceived. Now, to put all that info into a spreadsheet (plus charts) can be really tedious.
So far I manage to get the job done by assigning 1 to 4 values were 1 sucks and 4 is great and so there I go column after column (each column is one individual survey) filling my 1 to 4’s answers. I know there’s an easy version with VBA; problem is that I am a total ignorant in that area. Any suggestions?
Few ideas that would make consolidation easy:
- Make sure all the source files are in the same format: make a template that your colleagues can use to input the data every month. This way you can use 3D references to summarize the data.
- Create a user form so that your audience can enter information in that instead of directly entering it in spreadsheet.
- Find out if the survey or other type data collection can be fed to a database. This way, every month we can import the data using data connections.
- If we actually end up with sheets with different data formats, spend sometime and study the anomalies. Then you can develop a small macro or find-replace routine that would clean the data. [related: clean data using excel]
- Try to save the files as CSV and open them in a regular expression capable editor like Notepad++. Now match and clean up data.
- All else fails, get a strong cup of coffee, put on some music, roll your sleeves and start alt+tabbing.
But more than these ideas, I am interested to know how YOU solve this problem.
I think this is a very common problem. Since I have very little experience in the area of consolidating data from multiple sheets in to one, I couldn’t give her any real advise. So now I am turning to you.
- Do you use any add-ins or macros to consolidate data? What is your experience like, what would you recommend?
- What shortcuts, ideas and cool things you use when working on data from multiple sheets?
- How do you usually clean / normalize the data?
Please discuss.
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.