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.
27 Responses to “9 Box grid for talent mapping – HR for Excel – Template & Explanation”
Great stuff! I can understand how to add a slicer to the pivot table, but how do you implement the departmental selector on the 'Filter' formula scheme?
Just saw this on your Youtube channel, and it’s areat idea...!
An easy way to overcome the "ugliness" of pivot tables and get it to look nice (in the format of the Output sheet), would be to simply build a sheet with the nice map at the top, a pivot underneath it and a slicer next to formatted map and then reference each of the 9 cells in the formatted map to the “related” cell in the Pivot.
Keep up the good work!
/Claus
Thanks Claus. That is a great idea 🙂
Hi Chandoo,
This is great! Curious how to make additional columns operate the same as the Department column (ex. have a "manager column") that would allow you to sort a 9 box by manager, area, or team in addition to department?
Feel free to email me if needed! mfry01@minnetronixmedical.com
Happy New Year
Madison Fry
I am curious about the smae thing. I would like to populate the 9 box with other views as well by adding additional columns. IE., I would like to add location, region, etc. Thank you.
This is great, thank you!
How can i see the whole data set of all the teams in the output table. Need a formula that will pick up all the employees
Hello,
Love the template. Thank you. Question - the drop down to pick a department on the Output tab does not seem to work on the downloadable template. Am I doing something incorrectly?
Thank you!
Hi Heather... Thank you. I am using Excel 365 to make the calculations. If you are using an older version of Excel, then the drop-down filter won't work.
Hi
I was able to follow your 9 box grid and modified based my needs. However, you tutorial did not show how to you create the filter for the "Pick a department. Can you kindly share how to create that filter that updated the grid. Thank you.
I am working on this project but I am struggling with the data validation for the department. I copy the worksheets data entry and output as the managers want to see different tabs for each managers.
I updated the source reference for each tab but It does not update the grid based on the new source. The list was updated but it does not populate the grid based on the performance and potential listed.
In addition the hyperlink Update Data and View Talent Map no longer works. Can you please help me.
I keep getting this error message in the pivot table:
This formula is invalid or incomplete: 'The expression is not valid or appears to be incomplete. Please review and correct the expression.
The following syntax error occurred during parsing: Invalid token, Line 1, Offset 14, ‘.
Hi, I used your 9-box excel template with excel 365. First off, thank you so very much. It is incredibly helpful!! My only question is that the boxes aren't big enough for all of the employees (specifically the middle which we call 'Core Employee'). Is there a way to make the boxes larger? Even though it is in excel, I am not able to increase row height (like I normally do in a speadsheet). Any ideas? Thanks again, Jody
Hi Chandoo,
Thanks for the great content. Re. 9 box grid, pls advise how do I increase the size of the box to accommodate more names?
Hi Chandoo,
I figured it out. Excel 365 has the format row height on the ribbon. Thank you
Merci Chandoo pour le modèle proposé,
j'ai une question et un souhait est il possible de développer davantage ce modèle en insérant la photo de chaque employé.
Hi Chandoo!
Great tutorial and tool, thank you! Your tutorial didn't include how to create additional filters on the "Output" tab. Could you please share how you did it?
Can this be done exactly in google sheets?
Hi Chandoo,
Thanks for the video it was really helpful. Is there any way to multi select the dropdown to display multiple or all departments rather than just one at once?
Hello Prish
I have Microsoft 365 and I am struggling to make the boxes larger/unable to increase row height; any idea how you made this work? Specifically in the Output tab where the map is?
Many thanks
Hello Jody, I have Microsoft 365 and I am struggling to make the boxes larger/unable to increase row height; any idea how you made this work? Specifically in the Output tab where the map is? Many thanks
Is there a way to change the 9 box wording descriptions, i.e. Work Horses, to our own internal langauge?
You can edit the file. The descriptions are textboxes.
Hi Chandoo, this is awesome and has worked perfectly. Due to a big organisation the 9 box grid on the output file is too small. I tried adjusting using the row/width ribbon under the format ribbon however it doesn't seem to work. Is there an easier way to adjust this?
Thanks!
When I drag the formula, it doesn't work, and the order I use with the data changes. In the beginning, the order is it is " candidates," " potential," and " performance," but when it goes to another column, it is " Potential," Performance," and "Candidates."Can you help me? Thank you very much, sending love from vietnam
Hi- I am working on the 9 grid project and I am trying to expand the box since I have over 100 names on a few of the columns. How do I do that?
Hi, Thank you this is great stuff and really useful.
As well as department as demonstrated on your clip, how can I display all candidates on the grid at once?
Many thanks in advance