I know I am late to the party, but better late than…, uh! forget it.
As the keen readers of our blog knew, I like cricket and I show my enthusiasm by making an excel dashboard (or infographic) whenever Indian team reaches a major milestone. So naturally, I was super excited when we won the ICC Worldcup 2011. Last time Indian won the event was in 1983 and my idea of a dashboard at that time was a bottle of milk and jingo-bell, my favorite shake-to-make-annoying-noise toy. I think our latest world-cup victory deserves something more than that. So here we go.
Excel Dashboard to Celebrate India’s World-cup Victory (2011)
(Click here to see larger version)
How is this Dashboard constructed?
This dashboard was one of the most difficult ones I built, because I did not know what to put in the dashboard. I know that the dashboard should reflect our team’s hardwork, journey, outstanding performances but I had no clue which format & layout exposed these qualities. So I took a lot of time drawing up sketches of possible dashboards before hitting on the present layout. Once I came-up with the layout, the actual dashboard took me about 4 hours to make (and may be another 4 for polish).
Here are some of the techniques used in the dashboard:
- The dashboard is divided in to 3 areas – Highlights, our journey to the victory and best performances.
- Highlights: This section shows overall summary of all the 9 matches India have played. It shows some interesting statistics, how much our top players contributed to our victory etc.
Techniques used: All parts of this are made with text boxes and simple text formulas. - Our Journey to victory: This was the most time consuming & intense part of the dashboard as I made this portion interactive. The left side shows all the matches we have played by date and the results. When you select a particular match, the right side portion shows a match summary. This includes match venue, result, toss details, India’s top 3 batsmen, top 3 bowlers, photos of India’s best batting & bowling performers, oppositions score, best batsman, bowler, their stats. It also shows the country flags etc.
Techniques used: The click to select as described in on-demand charts article, conditional formatting, picture links, more picture links, LARGE formula.
The most difficult part of this was to get a moving arrow that would change its position based on which match is selected. I did this with picture links, offset formula and a dynamic named range. (Examine the named range movingArrow). - Best performances (top 10): In this area, I showed the best batting, bowling, catching, partnership performances for all the matches in World-cup (not just India’s matches).
Techniques used: All the charts are made in Excel 2010 using solid bar conditional formatting & picture link based techniques. Later, I just copied them and pasted as images so that they look same in Excel 2007 also.
Colors & Fonts:
- I choose the blue color as it is team India’s jersey color. I used orange to contrast the best performances.
- The fonts are Bookman Old Style & Meriyo UI.
Download the Cricket World-cup Dashboard Excel file:
Click here to download the locked workbook. [mirror]
Why lock it? I am giving away unlocked version of this workbook + a 36 minute lesson to all the customers who buy Excel Dashboard Tutorial or Excel School Dashboards. So if you want an unlocked copy of this, go ahead and get either of them. (If you have previously bought one of these products, you will receive an email with instructions on downloading your bonus.)
Credits:
All the data for the dashboard came from espncricinfo.com.
Special thanks to Ravindra, my assistant, for compiling the data.
How do you like the Dashboard?
I was afraid whether I can do justice to our team’s glorious world-cup victory in a dashboard. So I kept on delaying this. But in the end, I am happy with the dashboard. It tells the story of our team’s journey and highlights best performers.
What do you think? Did you like this dashboard? How would you have designed it?
As an aside, Many of our readers know only about cricket that chirps. So I want to ask, did this dashboard make any sense to you?
Other Awesome Resources on Excel Dashboards:
- Excel Info-graphic Poster to Celebrate Sachin’s 200 runs
- Excel Dashboard with 10007 comments data
- Excel Dashboard to prove that Hui is awesome
- More on Excel Dashboards
- Want to make dashboards using Excel – Join Excel School.
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.