HR managers & department heads always ask, “So what is the vacation pattern of our employees? What is our average absent rate?”
Today lets tackle that question and learn how to create a dashboard to monitor employee vacations.
What do HR Managers need? (end user needs)
There are 2 aspects tracking vacations.
- Data entry for vacations taken by employees
- Status dashboard to summarize vacation data
Based on my interaction with few HR managers, the below questions are asked most often when it comes to vacation tracking:
- What is the absent rate of our employees (in any year or latest 3 month period)
- What are the vacation patterns for individual employees (or teams)
- On which dates most employees are absent?
- Who is taking most (or least) vacation days?
A look at the completed Vacation Dashboard
Take a look at the completed dashboard (click to enlarge).
Constructing Employee Vacation Dashboard
The construction process can be broken in to 3 steps:
- Vacation tracker for entering dates & types of vacations.
- Calculation engine
- Dashboard design & formatting
Step 1: Creating a tracker for vacations
The best way to create a tracker is to use Excel tables. Set up one with 4 columns – Employee name, vacation type, start date & end date, like below:
By using tables, we can continue to add more vacation data (or remove older data) and all our formulas continue to work seamlessly.
Additional tables required…
Apart from the main vacations table, we need below tables:
- Employees table – to keep the names of employees
- Vacation types table – to keep the type of vacations
- Holidays table – with official holiday dates
Step 2: Calculation engine
There are 3 portions in our dashboard and each of them requires certain calculations.
- Date logic
- Employee view
- Calendar view
For all the views, the main driver is latest date, which is the maximum value of end date column in vacations table (=MAX(Vacations[End Date]))
Tip: Use Max to find latest date
Although the calculations are not very complex, explaining each of them can be very tedious. So let me summarize them with a diagram.
Important formulas used in the calculations:
The key formulas & ideas used are,
- Range lookup formula
- SUMIFS formula
- Calendar formulas
- EDATE, EOMONTH, WEEKDAY, NETWORKDAYS Formulas
- The lovely INDEX formula
Step 3: Dashboard design & formatting
This dashboard is an excellent example of synthesis – combination of multiple Excel features to create something very simple and easy to use.
Excel features & ideas used:
There are many Excel features & ideas used in this dashboard. First take a look at the illustration below.
- Combo box form control to select an employee to highlight their vacations
- Conditional formatting & cell grid to show vacations in a gantt chart like view.
- Highlighting selected employee’s vacations again using conditional formatting.
- Calendar view created by picture links
- Heat map of number of people away on each date using conditional formatting (similar example).
- Header section with references to calculations & cell formatting.
- Hyperlink on a rounded rectangle shape to link to tracker sheet.
Formatting the dashboard:
The basic layout of dashboard is just 3 boxes – a big summary box on top, a large employee view box (70%) and a small calendar view box (30%).
The fonts are Calibri & Cambria default fonts in Excel 2007 or above.
I used variations of Tan color in most areas of dashboard (headers, box backgrounds, buttons etc.) and shades of pink, blue, green & gray for marking the vacations. Orange is used to highlight selected employee’s vacations.
Although there is a lot of data, I designed this dashboard with minimal clutter. It is very easy to use (there is only one input control).
Download Employee Vacation Dashboard
Click here to download the employee vacation tracker & dashboard workbook. Play with it to learn more.
How do you like this dashboard?
I have thoroughly enjoyed the process of building this dashboard. I especially loved how picture links, conditional formatting heat maps (color scales) & simple calendar logic all have blended in to create a stunning calendar view.
What about you? Do you like this dashboard? How would you have designed it? Go ahead and share your feedback, ideas & suggestions for improvements in comments. I am eager to learn from you.
Want to learn more about this dashboard?
If you want to learn how this dashboard is constructed in a detailed fashion (along with 6 other dashboards & ton of material on dashboard design process) then please consider joining in our Excel School Dashboards program. Just today, I have uploaded a lesson (35 mins) on Employee Vacation dashboard to our Excel School website. You can use it and 32 hours more of video instruction to become awesome in Excel.
26 Responses to “FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets [Roundup]”
Nice roundup! Do you know of any one-page spreadsheets which will be updated by an administrator after each game? Would be nice to be able to print out the latest results whenever I feel like checking them as I probably won't be following closely every day.
I actually haven't tried any of the above ones yet, but I thought I'd mention this one that I found which makes a nice one-page form you can fill in dynamically. http://exceltemplate.net/sports/world-cup-2010-schedule-and-scoresheet/
I would like to recommend you these one: http://www.anotagol.com/
You can choose your interface language (english, spanish, italian, portuguese, german or french) and your country for the timezone of match. I like it very much.
An awesome online world cup calendar in flash.
http://www.marca.com/deporte/futbol/mundial/sudafrica-2010/calendario-english.html
Got one more tracker in excel (one page)
http://cid-b09e57e6e960505c.office.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public
[...] Passend zu gerade laufenden Fußball-WM gibt es auf Chandoo.org alles wissenswerte über Excel-Anwendungen für den Fußball-Fan. [...]
Great!!!
I strongly recommend this :
http://www.en.excel-soccer-2010.de/downloads
Chandoo how you found this ...
@Rohit.. really beautiful file. I missed it during my research. Now, I recommend it. 🙂
Hi Chandoo - thanks for the recommandation 🙂 - Regards
[...] Excel, then print it on the other side of your Match Schedule from step 2 above. There are several other Excel spreadsheet templates you can download, but this is probably the only one-page version you can find; plus, it [...]
Does anybody know how to re-create this(?): http://www.marca.com/deporte/futbol/mundial/sudafrica-2010/calendario-english.html
...or do you know where a template can be found? I am DYING to have something like this on my site. When I found it, I had been looking for the longest time for a circular calendar. I found a couple that weren't adequate. Then I stumbled upon this one and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. If anyone can lead me in the right direction, I would be eternally grateful!
Thanks in advance!
Robert
@Robert...
Doing something like that is a lot of work. You can probably get it done with some hired help from a flash developer.
@Robert, the World Cup flash in the Spanish Marca newspaper is impresive, but not much as my own animated spreadsheet with the Goals of 2010 World Cup South Africa in Excel that I just published into my blog:
http://pedrowave.blogspot.com/2010/06/goals-of-2010-world-cup-south-africa-in.html
Download from here:
http://cid-6b219f16da7128e3.office.live.com/view.aspx/.Public/Goals%20South%20Africa%20Animated.xlsx
And start to enter the goals of the rest of matches.
Has anyone seen, or made, a Spreadsheet where you can record the scorers and see a 'top scorers' chart. Would be a nice enhancement
@Neil... checkout this one http://www.inflexionary.com/sports/world-cup-2010-excel
it uses macros to fetch scores from web (and provides very comprehensive analysis too)
@All.. Thanks for the comments. I have updated the post with few more links now.
Hi,
Check this dashboards too:
http://dashboards.org/world-cup-dashboards-and-visualizations/
😉
[...] Here is a collection of FIFA World Cup Spreadsheets if you are more in to that sort of thing. | [...]
[...] Cup fever is here!In FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets Roundup, Chandoo has some links to useful World Cup tracking workbooks. Only one of them (the first one) [...]
[...] World Cup fever is here!In FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets Roundup, Chandoo has some links to useful World Cup tracking workbooks. Only one of them (the first one) [...]
Hey, you missed ours! It has everything you need and more, but not a whole pile of silly extras (National Anthems, etc). I'll be making another one for the 2014 world cup. We had over 4000 hits on it!
@Michael Harwood.
Where is it then? You should have posted a link
Sie sollten an einem Wettbewerb teil zu nehmen für einen der besten Blogs im Web. Ich werde empfehlen Sie diese Seite!
Google translation: You should take part in a contest for one of the best blogs on the web. I will recommend this site!
[...] and welcome to the forum, Maybe these similar spreadsheets might give you a few initial ideas: FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets [Roundup] | Chandoo.org - Learn Microsoft Excel Online If you have specific areas / formulae / layout choices for parts of your spreadsheet that you are [...]
Calling all football fans around the globe! The biggest football festival will kick off on the 12th June 2014 and everyone is placing their bets of who will have the honour of lifting the golden trophy.
Use our free interactive Excel templatel to predict the World cup finalists ! No macros !
http://www.spreadsheet1.com/world-cup-2014-free-excel-prediction-template.html
I also made a Worldcup-tracker, with MS Access, which can also generate reports in Excel
e.g. a match-schedule with locations on y-axis and dates on x-axis, see:
http://worktimesheet2014.blogspot.com.es/2014/05/excel-with-match-schedule-for-2014-fifa.html
and:
http://worktimesheet2014.blogspot.com.es/2014/05/match-access-app-to-track-world-cup.html
where can i find raw data in excel file format of fifa world cups (1930-2014)
@Vivek
Have a read of: http://chandoo.org/forum/threads/goal-of-world-cup.17637/
The location is mentioned in Somendra's comments
Free XLSX Prediction Spreadsheet for World Cup 2018 Russia!
https://www.spreadsheet1.com/fifa-world-cup-2018-russia-free-prediction-templates-for-excel.html