This post is part of Excel Dashboard Week
Early in Jan, I got this mail from Mara, a student in Excel School first batch.
Hi Chandoo,
I took your first Excel batch class and loved it. I created a dynamic and interactive dashboard for my work. My boss thinks it’s an excellent tool and I have you to thank for and also Francis Chin who shared his travel dynamic dashboard. I integrated things you taught so thanks so much!
I felt very proud reading her email, so I asked her if she can share the dashboard with some dummy data so that we all can learn from her example.
Being a lovely person Mara is, she gladly emailed me the workbook and I am thrilled to include it in Dashboard Week.
Customer Service Dashboard Snapshot:
Here is the dashboard that Mara prepared.
[View this dashboard image in full size | Demo of this dashboard]
Techniques used by Mara to Create this Dashboard:
Mara used several techniques to create this dashboard. But I specifically liked 5 things about this dashboard. They are,
- Tweetboard kind of area at the top where she showed summary of status. [Related tip]
- Dynamic dashboard which can be filtered based on a month.
- Interactive chart with check boxes to show / hide information. [Related tip]
- Interactive comparison chart to compare target with actual performances (of valet wait times). [Related tip]
- Scrollable list of various gift shop items. [Related tip]
Download Customer Service Dashboard Excel Workbook
Click here to download the workbook prepared by Mara.
I encourage you to examine the file and see how you can implement similar dashboard in your area of work.
Thank you Mara
Thank you so much for your generosity and enthusiasm to educate us. I have enjoyed examining your dashboard. You have shown creativity and skill in putting this together.
If you like this file, say thanks to Mara.
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8 Responses to “Pivot Tables from large data-sets – 5 examples”
Do you have links to any sites that can provide free, large, test data sets. Both large in diversity and large in total number of rows.
Good question Ron. I suggest checking out kaggle.com, data.world or create your own with randbetween(). You can also get a complex business data-set from Microsoft Power BI website. It is contoso retail data.
Hi Chandoo,
I work with large data sets all the time (80-200MB files with 100Ks of rows and 20-40 columns) and I've taken a few steps to reduce the size (20-60MB) so they can better shared and work more quickly. These steps include: creating custom calculations in the pivot instead of having additional data columns, deleting the data tab and saving as an xlsb. I've even tried indexmatch instead of vlookup--although I'm not sure that saved much. Are there any other tricks to further reduce the file size? thanks, Steve
Hi Steve,
Good tips on how to reduce the file size and / or process time. Another thing I would definitely try is to use Data Model to load the data rather than keep it in the file. You would be,
1. connect to source data file thru Power Query
2. filter away any columns / rows that are not needed
3. load the data to model
4. make pivots from it
This would reduce the file size while providing all the answers you need.
Give it a try. See this video for some help - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u7bpysO3FQ
Normally when Excel processes data it utilizes all four cores on a processor. Is it true that Excel reduces to only using two cores When calculating tables? Same issue if there were two cores present, it would reduce to one in a table?
I ask because, I have personally noticed when i use tables the data is much slower than if I would have filtered it. I like tables for obvious reasons when working with datasets. Is this true.
John:
I don't know if it is true that Excel Table processing only uses 2 threads/cores, but it is entirely possible. The program has to be enabled to handle multiple parallel threads. Excel Lists/Tables were added long ago, at a time when 2 processes was a reasonable upper limit. And, it could be that there simply is no way to program table processing to use more than 2 threads at a time...
When I've got a large data set, I will set my Excel priority to High thru Task Manager to allow it to use more available processing. Never use RealTime priority or you're completely locked up until Excel finishes.
That is a good tip Jen...