Creating KPI Dashboards in Microsoft Excel [Part 1 of 4]

Creating KPI Dashboards in Microsoft Excel is a series of 4 posts by Robert from Munich, Germany. Robert has been using excel for last 18 years starting with MS Excel version 3.0 in 1990. He has huge passion for data visualization and presentation using excel. When I got a mail from him 2 weeks back [...]

Use min-max charts to tell the whole story - excel charting idea

Next time you want to make a chart to tell how your sales (defects, customer calls, page views, number of clicks, walk-ins etc.) are doing over a period of time, consider showing them in a min-max chart.
For eg. a min-max sales chart for the last 12 months tells average, minimum and maximum sales per [...]

Excel Basics: How to add drop down list to validate data

Validating your data as you type can prevent any surprises when you are doing analysis / follow-up on the data. Thankfully, excel has the right tools to do it. In-cell drop-down lists or combo boxes can assist you in picking up a value from a valid list to enter in a cell. Here is a [...]

Want to Feed RSS to your Excel Sheet? Read this!

RSS feeds are everywhere. So much that you cannot avoid them in your data processing, analytics or day to day spreadsheet needs.
If you can get the RSS feeds to excel sheet you can do pretty interesting things with it, like:

Prepare a sheet to watch deals on Amazon, Craigslist, Deals2buy and other favorite sites
Watch news, [...]

Shuffle a list of numbers / items in excel spreadsheet

Here is a quick Monday tip for data junkies.

If you want to shuffle a list of numbers or cells in excel in random order you can do that with “data > sort” menu option of excel.

First insert a column next to the list you want to shuffle and enter random numbers in each [...]

Changing Sort Orientation in Excel - Sorting across columns instead of rows

change-sort-orientation-excel-columns

You can sort data across columns instead of rows by changing sort options. If you ever had to sort across columns now you know a simple way to do this
Follow these steps for changing sort orientation:

Select the table you want to sort (just the data, not the headers as when you change sort [...]

Become a Dashboard Ninja with Bullet Graphs

Bullet graphs provide an effective way to dashboard target vs. actual performance data, the bread and butter of corporate analytics.
Howmuchever effective they are, the sad truth is there is no one easy way to do them in excel. I have prepared a short tutorial that can make you a dashboard ninja without writing extensive [...]