This is a Guest Post by Robert on Visualization Techniques for Excel KPI Dashboards.
This 6 Part Tutorial on Management Dashboards Teaches YOU:
Creating a Scrollable List View in Dashboard
Add Ability to Sort on Any KPI to the Dashboard
Highlight KPIs Based on Percentile
Add Microcharts to KPI Dashboards
Compare 2 KPIs in the Dashboards Using Form Controls
Show the Distribution of a KPI using Box Plots
In this final post we will learn how to add a box plot to show the distribution of values
The solution
The most common way in descriptive statistics to visualize the distribution of sets of numerical data is a box plot. But according to my experience in day to day business, most business people are not familiar with this type of visualization.
Therefore we try to create a simpler chart which is hopefully easier to understand:
The light grey bar visualizes the range of all values, the dark grey bar the range of the 10 items displayed on the management dashboard table. The cross shows the total average and – similar to the bullet graphs – the vertical line represents the target. This is less information than a real box whisker plot would provide, but I guess it will be easier to understand.
The implementation
Download the Excel KPI dashboard final workbook and read on how to create a simplified box plot.
- Let’s bring our ducks in a row first. Calculate all necessary data to be shown in the box plots: the minimum and maximum of the total data and of the 10 displayed items on the dashboard, the average and the target. The formulas are quite simple. You can find them in the downloaded workbook in
calculation!AZ23:BE27. - The basis of our visualization is a stacked bar chart with only one category and 4 data series:
- the invisible bar (the bar between 0 and the total minimum),
- the left light grey bar (the bar between the total minimum and the minimum of the displayed 10 items),
- the dark grey bar (the bar between the minimum and maximum of the 10 displayed values) and
- the right light grey bar (the bar between the maximum of the 10 displayed items and the total maximum).
Again the formulas to calculate these values are quite simple (see calculation!BF23:BI27).
- Create a stacked bar chart and format the bars accordingly (no fill color and no border for the invisible bar, light and dark grey fill colors for the other bars).
- Add the average and the target values as additional series to the chart and change the chart type of these new series to XY scatter charts (X is the average / target value, Y is a dummy 1). Format the average as a cross (or whatever you choose) and use the error bars to format the target as a vertical line. The method of creating a combination chart of bars and XY scatters is pretty much the same we used in the 4th post of the KPI dashboard series (here).
- Remove or hide all unnecessary chart elements: no fill color and no border for plot or chart area; no line, tick marks etc. for the vertical axes, etc.
- Repeat steps 3 to 5 to create charts for all 5 KPI.
- Bring the charts to the dashboard, position them and add a caption to explain the chart elements.
That’s it. Play around with the new feature: change the sort criteria or sort order or scroll up and down the dashboard table and see how the new charts are changing.
Final Remark
This is a simplified version of box plot visualization and works only for data sets with positive values. Of course there is also a more sophisticated way of creating charts like this for any data (positive and negative values, i.e. bars crossing the vertical axis). This is a bit more complicated since you need 8 data series for the bar chart instead of 4 but the principle is exactly the same.
Our final KPI dashboard looks like this (click on it for a larger version):
What’s next?
With this last part I guess the time may have come to end the series about Excel Management KPI Dashboards here and to hand over the further development of this dashboard to the readers of Chandoo.org.
I do hope the series of 6 posts have been useful for your daily work and provided new ideas. Make sure you have downloaded the Excel KPI dashboard tutorial workbook
Thanks for all your comments and appreciations.
Last but not least: Chandoo, my friend, once more thank you so much for hosting my ideas at Chandoo.org.
Kind regards from Munich
Robert
Chandoo’s note
If not for Robert’s mail in August suggesting these wonderful ideas as posts in PHD, I would never have learned these things or shared them with you all. I am thankful to him for that.
Well, I am constantly trying to learn new dashboard techniques and I will try to share the worthy ones with you all. Meanwhile if you have a good idea for excel dashboards (or charts, techniques etc.) and would like to share with everyone, feel free to drop a comment or write to me. I will be *happy* to feature your ideas.
Further Reading on Dashboards using Excel
Checkout our exclusive section: Excel Dashboards for more tutorials, tips, design principles.
You can also consider joining my Excel School program to learn how to make world-class dashboards.
28 Responses to “2010 Calendar – Excel Template [Downloads]”
[...] Download and print the calendars today. You can add notes to individual dates or complete … [...] Uni Ego / Free 2010 Calendar – Download and Print Year 2010 Calendar today [...]
Any chance on a 2016 calendar?
Afternoon,
I have one similar calander that I added conditional formatting to so that I could highlight any planned factory holidays. I think i "borrowed" the formula from another calander so I won't post it here.
I also added week numbers to it using the formula =WEEKNUM(MAX(C6:I6)) Where C6:I6 is the range of dates in that give week. It works fine on most of the months but return strange values on other months (Week 6 in October?) I can't see any logic behind why it does this.
Any suggestions for an alternative formula to give the week numbers?
Regards,
William
Hi Chandoo,
I've added a new feature on your spreadsheet.
This control can be useful for all the sheets where you need to check dates.
Cheers
http://cid-69a78592a23a8438.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/2010-calendar%5E_Miguel.xls
Hi Chandoo,
Nice calendar.
Till now whichever calendar I saw in Excel, it contained only the outline sheet.
Good to see monthly views and the mini view too.
Liked the mini view much. 🙂
-Nimesh
@William: This weeknum may be because the input dates to max are not properly formatting as excel dates.
Good tip on the conditional formatting and holidays btw...
@Migueal: Now that is super awesome. This is the reason why I love to blog. Readers will always one up me with such cool alternatives. Thank you for sharing this with us.
@Nimesh: You are welcome 🙂
is it possible to get the Notes section on the outline page to display the notes added to the month page for a specific date?
So if you add thing for January 2nd, and then select January 2nd those notes appear on the outline page
@Shish... You can do that using some formula magic. I would not recommend pushing excel to that as outlook / google calendar / icalc etc. do exactly that much more elegantly.
[...] Perpetual Excel Calendar – Free Downloadable Template [...]
Happy christmas to all of you!
This is really awesome. The nicest calender I've seen for Excel. I also like Miguels version of the sheet.
Just one "feature" is missing to me. As I live in Germany - where weeks start on Monday - I'd like to change this. Could someone please give me a hint how to do this?
Thanks in advance
Jörg
Hi Chandoo, I’ve added some new features on your spreadsheet with your permission.
Check it here:
http://cid-6b219f16da7128e3.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/Calendar%5E_Pedro.xlsm
Miguel, this calendar is translated to Spanish language.
Jörg, this new approach allows us to start weeks on Monday.
Also it's possible to start weeks on Sunday if you enable Excel macros and push the arrows.
Best Regards,
Pedro.
@Pedro.. superb stuff.. thanks for sharing the file with all of us.
Hi Chandoo, for dates before March 1, 1900 our calendars are wrong.
In Microsoft Excel, DATE, EOMONTH, WEEKDAY functions return an incorrect result between Monday, January 1, 1900 and Wednesday, February 28, 1900.
See this page: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214326/en-us/
Microsoft Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year in all Excel versions.
That's the reason why our calendar versions only work from March, 1, 1900 until December, 31, 9999.
Your comments are welcome.
Pedro.
@Pedro.. Thanks for pointing that out. wow... This reminds me of the Joel Spolsky's first BillG review - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html (read it, I am sure you would love it.) when Bill out of blue asks about date time implementations for VBA (which Joel is the program manager for...)
Thanks for sharing the URL too... Here is a specially made, chocolate sprinkled, extra fluffy donut for you 🙂
Hi Chandoo, thanks a lot for the donut but I prefer it without chocolate!
Always it's good to know a little history of Excel.
The Joel Spolsky’s last BillG Excel review was about the "Hall of Tortured Souls"
(See this Excel 95 Easter Egg here: http://www.eeggs.com/items/719.html)
Do not miss the humor!
@Chandoo.. I just return with a new calendar version.
http://cid-6b219f16da7128e3.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/calendar-pedrowave.xltx
It helped me to practice conditional formatting, formulas to show check boxes, data validation drop down list, find out Thanksgiving Day's date for any year, how to find dates of public holidays using Excel, all reading your wonderful posts!
Perpetual Calendar Spanish version starting weeks on Monday:
http://cid-6b219f16da7128e3.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/calendario-pedrowave.xltx
Main characteristics:
- Not macros.
- Select a year from 1900 to 9999 with a dropdown listbox.
- All date fields with the real date format.
- Easy language change of day of the week and month names because are also dates.
- Hide Saturdays and/or Sundays.
- Week starting on Sunday or Monday.
- Week and month numbers.
- Hyperlink between sheets.
- Consistent colors to Holidays, Diary and Events dates.
- Easy change of Holidays by country.
- Include 80 World Days and you can add more.
- A diary with my birthday and 50 more programable appointments.
- Check box to hide individual dates or all.
- Holidays, diary and events text are showed on each month's sheet.
- Ranges defined with Name Manager variables.
I'll appreciate if you make me some suggestions to improve this calendar.
Pedro.
Please, I need help!
I like all calendar from Pedro, thank you for them. Let me show my problem:
I have 2 excel cells (for example AE12 and AE13) which mean the starting and the ending date of my duty. I need a macro to insert sheets with label YEAR. MONTH (for example 2010. August or similar) with the proper datas between the two dates. Is it possible?
Thank you for reading me and sorry about my terribel english! 🙂
Hello Pedro,
Thanks so much for the modified calendar template. I love the extra functionality you added. Is there any way you could upload an unlocked version? I wanted to change some of the comments and data validation so I could use it for one of my applications.
As for feedback on potential improvements, with all the additions you made the file runs pretty slow. I'm sure this has to do with all the interconnectivity between the various tabs, but if there is a way to use less memory via more efficient formulas or something else I think this would make it easier to use. I have a brand new computer and with it running alone the response was pretty slow. One of the changes I'm making is changing the order of the months to match my company's fiscal year, so maybe something to automate a change like that could be useful.
Cheers,
Peter
Peter, my calendars are unlocked but you need Excel 2007 and 2010 versions to open them.
Now I return with a new Programmable Task Calendar:
http://cid-6b219f16da7128e3.office.live.com/view.aspx/.Public/Calendario%20de%20Tareas.xlsx
Wath an introductory video here:
http://pedrowave.blogspot.com/2010/10/programmable-task-calendar.html
This new calendar allows to select the start month to match the school and fiscal year.
This is great stuff Chandoo and company
Wanted to know if someone had built something similar
I need to store one Excel Sheet on this calendar that has all the holidays
US Holidays appear in RED
UK Holidays appear in Blue
Meetings appear in Green
Submissions appear in Orange
Is there a way I can store the list in a separate worksheet and all the calendars get updated with this?
Thanks
[...] Calendars: Year 2010 Excel Calendar | Year 2009 Excel [...]
please tell me "how to convert Rs.10000/- in to words through excel formula
[...] is all! http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/12/11/2010-calendar-excel-template-downloads/ See more Templates at http://www.vertex42.com/ Share this:Like this:LikeBe the first to like this [...]
Greetings,
Thanks for this wonderful excel vacation tracker. I notice that the tracker only has three months November, December and January 2015, however, I would like to add the other ten months for 2014. Can you please instruct me on how I can add the other months?
Thanking you in advance.
Hi Chandoo,
Calendar: can this be printed as single sheet 8.5x11 inch per month
kanu
@Kanu
Yes,
You can resize it to fit
WOW! I just searching some of like this, that help me.
Thank you for sharing.