This article is written by Myles Arnott from Excel Audit
In the first part on our Modeling Best Practices series, we learned 5 best practices to follow. This article shows how to automatically implement the best practices using macros.
Quick Re-cap on Modeling Best Practices
Make cell content and cell purpose visually identifiable at all times
In the first article I highlighted the fact that the content and purpose of every cell should be easily identifiable to the user at all times.
At a basic level we can identify two basic cell types:
| Type | Background | Font | Protection |
| Assumption or constant | White | Blue | No |
| Output | Grey | Black | Yes |
Best Practice formatting made easy
In order to make the application of Best Practice formatting quicker and easier I have created three simple macros. These macros use Excel’s Go To Special function and then some simple formatting to the active sheet.
Demo of the macros
Please watch this 5 minute demo to understand how the macros work.
[Click here to watch the video]
Overview of best practice macros
Auto_Format: automatically formats cells depending on their type:
- Number constants (i.e. input cells) are white background, blue font & unprotected
- Non number constants (e.g. formulae) are grey background, black text & protected
Constants_Format: formats selected cells as white background, blue text & unprotected
Formula_Format: formats selected cells as grey background, black text & protected
And a couple of extras:
Simple_Audit: A Simple Audit Macro that uses the go to special function to select and highlight specific cell types. This is the macro from the Managing Spreadsheet Risk article.
Clear_format: formats all cells as white background, black text & protected
A word of warning: These macros apply formatting to your spreadsheets. This formatting cannot be undone.
File to download
Since formatting steps vary for Excel 2003 & 2007, we have 2 versions of the files. Please download the appropriate file below:
These files have the macros embedded in them. You will need to move these macros into your personal workbook. Help on this.
Once in your personal workbook you can then add these to your QAT, or Ribbon.
Conclusion
Have a play with the macros on the example workbook and then, once you are happy with how to use them, you can start applying best practice formatting at the click of a button.
Let us know how you are implementing these best practices and your suggestions using comments.
Thanks to Myles
Many thanks to Myles for compiling all the tips & sharing this with us. If you have enjoyed this article, please say thanks to Myles. You can also reach him at Excel Audit or his linkedin profile.
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.