A good dashboard must show important information at a glance and provide option to drill down for details.
Showing Top 10 (or bottom 10) lists in a dashboard is a good way to achieve this (see below).
Today we will learn an interesting technique to do this in Excel.
Lets assume you are the owner of ACME inc. and you want to show the performance of your products in a dashboard. But since you hate clutter (and love Coyote, your lone customer), you want to show the top 10 products by sales & orders and give an option to drill down if someone is interested.
Lets say your data looks like this:
Now, follow these simple steps.
- Select your data & insert a pivot table (tutorial here).
- Use product as the row label & sales as the value for pivot table.
- Now, sort the products by descending order of sales – See this:
- Comeback to dashboard and point to first 10 rows of the pivot report using cell references.
- Type view more in a cell beneath the top 10 and press CTRL+K (this opens the hyperlink dialog box).
- Just point to cell A1 in your pivot report worksheet. Click OK.
- Now, if you click on the view more link, you will jump to pivot report instantly. Pretty neat, eh?
- That is all. Go sell some Mouse Snare or Iron Bird Seed. Mr. Wile is at the counter.
Advantages of this technique:
Ardent readers of chandoo.org or dashboard practitioners usually rely on a sort & scroll technique similar to the one we discussed in KPI Dashboards post. But as you can see, using formulas & form controls is a tedious process. If you want to filter your source data based on a criteria (say top products by sales where refund rate is more than 3%) then your formulas will be awfully long and complicated.
This is where pivot tables shine. They are easy to setup. You can sort & filter pivot tables in multiple ways & then link the output to dashboard tables (or charts) with ease.
Download Example Dashboard with top 10 tables
Click here to download the example dashboard with top 10 tables. This is a demonstrative file, not a real dashboard. So take it with a pinch of salt (or TNT if you fancy).
Do you show Top 10 values in Dashboards?
I use them all the time. You can see top 10 values in many of the dashboards I constructed or recommend. (here is 1,2,3). I think they are a great way to capture attention and encourage analysis. You can get top 10 values using either pivot tables like above or use formulas like large & small. You can even set up dynamic charts to show top 10 values. or use Conditional formatting to highlight top 10 values. I just love them.
What about you? Do you show top / bottom values in your dashboards? What techniques and ideas you follow. Please share using comments.
More Excel Dashboard Techniques:
- Display Alerts in Dashboards to catch user attention
- Budget vs. Actual charts in Dashboards
- Use shapes in Dashboards to make them effective
- More Excel Dashboard tips, tricks, templates & tutorials
Get Dashboard Training from Chandoo.org
I have made an hour long video training explaining how to construct Excel Dashboards using a recent dashboard I made as an example. If you work on dashboards, this is a good program for you. Click here to learn more.
13 Responses to “Gantt Box Chart Tutorial & Template – Download and Try today”
Hi Chandoo
As one of your students I have followed your detailed example through with great success. However, Excel is acting in an unexpected way and I wonder if you could take a look?
http://cid-95d070c79aef808e.office.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/Gantt%20Box%20Chart.xlsm
On my version, I have to type 40239 (Which equates to 2 Mar 2010) to get the chart to display 31 May 2010 (which should be 40329)!!??
Have I done something wrong or is Excel acting up?
Thx
Oli
PS Your example file in 2007 displays correctly.
Hi,
I like this idea a lot, but I agree the name is a little drab.
As an American I may just be seeing things, but to me the combination of lines and bars on your chart looks like a bunch of cricket bats.
Maybe you could work that into a catchier name. 🙂
Cheers!
Here is some code I use to keep the axis synched.
It may be useful to some of your readers
It is based on a comment I saw on Daily Dose of Excel.
Function SynchGanttAxis(Cname, lower, upper)
'Sets the X min and X max for Category axis
Application.Volatile
On Error Resume Next
'
'Top Horizontal Axis
With ActiveSheet.Shapes(Cname).Chart.Axes(xlCategory, 1)
.MinimumScale = lower
.MaximumScale = upper
End With
'Bottom Horizontal Axis
With ActiveSheet.Shapes(Cname).Chart.Axes(xlValue, 2)
.MinimumScale = lower
.MaximumScale = upper
End With
End Function
Function SynchVerticalAxis(Cname, lower, upper)
Application.Volatile
On Error Resume Next
' Excel 2007 only
'Right hand vertical axis
With ActiveSheet.Shapes(Cname).Chart.Axes(xlValue, 1)
.MinimumScale = 0
.MaximumScale = upper
End With
End Function
@Oli.. Can you check your file again.. I see 40329...
@Dave: Even I saw things.. the bars actually looked like lollipops. How about calling this lollipop chart - now that would be yummy and goes along the tradition of naming charts after eatables (bar, pie, donut...)
@Bob: Superb stuff... thanks for sharing 🙂
Hi Chandoo
This looks really good and I think it can also be applied to show project phases / milestones.
Question: Thinking further could this be amended to display a project lifecycle (Idea through to Implementation say 7 phases) on one bar / row? Just imagine 20 projects within a programme all on one chart one bar each showing their respective lifecycle stages i.e. on one page.
Idea: As the Gantt Box Chart this is quite intensive to set up re formatting etc how about the added extra of once you have completed this to "Save as template" i.e. saves the formatting and layout of the chart as a template so you can apply to future charts. Simple to do and will save the time formatting etc again and again and again.
Therefore tip: Click on your chart demo and then click on Save As template icon (2007) - edit file name and click on save. Ready to use / apply via Templates in Change Chart Type window.
Thanks and be very interested if the lifecycle question can be resolved
Mike
How embarrassing.
I was obviously suffering from numerical dyslexia. I was one of those days.
@Mike H: You can easily make this chart to work like a generic project lifecycle plan chart. All you have to do is,
1. in a separate sheet define the steps of lifecycle and various dates in a table (with 5 columns for each of the projects you have).
2. now use a control cell to input the project name you want to show in the chart
3. based on the input, use OFFSET Formulas to get the correct data
4. Rest is same as the tutorial above
For more info on the dynamic charting visit http://chandoo.org/wp/tag/dynamic-charts/ and http://chandoo.org/wp?s=OFFSET
Your solution is really smart but in the en Excel isn't meant to do stuff like this. I, as a former PM, always thought is was frustrating that you had to do stuff like this for something simple like a Gantt chart. So I built Tom's Planner. And would like to plug it here. I think it really solves the problem you are trying to solve in the most efficient way. Check out http://www.tomsplanner.com for a free account or play around with the demo.
Hi there,
Chandoo - this is really a very nice and helpfull chart - I adopted it, so I can report a forecast or the delay of a certain task (coming from my role as an auditor for projects).
One topic I´m currently struggeling with: I do have a project lasting for lets say 12 month. For a management reporting, I want to have kind of snapshot, lets say one month back and 2 month in the future. I tried with the offset formula, but failed. Any idea?
Thx
Lopi
[...] Ein viel geliebter Klassiker ist die Erstellung von GANTT-Diagrammen mit Excel. Wir hatten das Thema wiederholt schon hier. Chandoo.org hat sich mal wieder mit einer neuen Variante hervorgetan: Das GANTT-Box-Chart. [...]
[...] [...]
Hi Chandoo - fantastic xls. One thing I can't figure out how to do is adjust the alignment of the vertical axis. I would like to left align so that I could indent to represent sub tasks. Can that be done? Or is there a better way?
I've been trying to work out if there's a way to show weekends on the graph. The closest thing I've got is to add them on a secondary axis, but then I haven't been able to keep both axis lined up together! Any ideas?
Following on from this - is it possible to show things like holidays?