fbpx
Search
Close this search box.

Dashboarding Fun – Display Smileys in your excel dashboards

Share

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

dashboard-fun-smiley-symbol-excelDashboards are daily staple for some of us who need to report status to our bosses, present them in weekly meetings or generally CC half the world with what is up on our end.

There are several ways in which you can spice up the dashboard, one of the simple things to do is, to replace the standard Red, Green & Amber with Smileys 🙁 😐 🙂 Just follow these 3 simple steps add smileys to your dashboard.

  • First create a dashboard as usual

    Of course, this is what you do everyday, so move on to next one

  • Add a column to display smiley symbols

    The standard spreadsheet fonts like Arial, Verdana or Comic Sans (ahem) do not have smiley symbols as characters. You need to change the font to “Wingdings” (just select the cells, hit ctrl+shit+f to change the font), in this font, the characters JKL stand for :) :| :( respectively.

    Thus, in order to show smileys in the new column you can write a simple if formula like =IF(target < sales,"J",IF(target > sales,"L","K"))

  • Finally, add conditional formatting to change the smiley color

    Select the smiley cells, and launch conditional formatting dialog to specify conditions to change the color of cell contents. For eg. red when sales < target, blue when sales > target and gray otherwise as shown below:

    excel-dashboard-conditional-formatting

So go ahead, wow someone with a smiley dashboard.

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Share this tip with your colleagues

Excel and Power BI tips - Chandoo.org Newsletter

Get FREE Excel + Power BI Tips

Simple, fun and useful emails, once per week.

Learn & be awesome.

Welcome to Chandoo.org

Thank you so much for visiting. My aim is to make you awesome in Excel & Power BI. I do this by sharing videos, tips, examples and downloads on this website. There are more than 1,000 pages with all things Excel, Power BI, Dashboards & VBA here. Go ahead and spend few minutes to be AWESOME.

Read my storyFREE Excel tips book

Overall I learned a lot and I thought you did a great job of explaining how to do things. This will definitely elevate my reporting in the future.
Rebekah S
Reporting Analyst
Excel formula list - 100+ examples and howto guide for you

From simple to complex, there is a formula for every occasion. Check out the list now.

Calendars, invoices, trackers and much more. All free, fun and fantastic.

Advanced Pivot Table tricks

Power Query, Data model, DAX, Filters, Slicers, Conditional formats and beautiful charts. It's all here.

Still on fence about Power BI? In this getting started guide, learn what is Power BI, how to get it and how to create your first report from scratch.

12 Responses to “Dashboarding Fun – Display Smileys in your excel dashboards”

  1. Jon Peltier says:

    Display smileys? Yeah, you don't want anyone thinking your dashboard is serious or anything.

  2. Chandoo says:

    Hmm.. I guess smileys have traveled alot to become mainstream, these days I see them pretty much everywhere, agree that all those wink, sleep, dance, rofls may be silly, but the basic smile, sad are so common that often I had to backspace them in much more formal mails, documents. 🙂

  3. Sam Krysiak says:

    I use these all the time! A simple graphic makes it very easy to compare performance figures in large lists.

    In response to Jon's comment, regular arrow placeholders work well for dashboards intended for a more conservative audience; see http://chandoo.org/wp/2006/09/05/3-steps-to-create-cool-dashboards-in-excel/

  4. Tony says:

    I'm with Jon on this one. It doesn't seem too professional to have smileys on a business dashboard. I would prefer the arrows.

  5. cam balkon says:

    thank you for sharing

  6. Hui... says:

    Hey Chandoo
    There a spelling mistake in the 3rd line of the "Add a column to display smiley symbols" section above "Ctrl+Shi.."
    Only took 16 months to pickup

  7. Chris says:

    Thanks for the useful information

  8. [...] Dashboarding Fun – Display Smileys in your excel dashboards |Add a column to display smiley symbols … Display smileys? Yeah, you don’t want anyone thinking your dashboard is serious or anything. … I guess smileys have traveled alot to become mainstream, these days I see them pretty much everywhere, agree that all those wink, sleep, dance, rofls may be silly, but the basic smile, [...]

  9. Simon says:

    Hello,

    I have a spreadsheet similar to the one above where it shows arrows depending on the previous cell number. However, what I really want to do is every time new quarter (4 x quarters) results are added for the year I would like to show the arrow (up, down, same) from what the previous Quarter was but struggling on what to put in the formula. Current formula is for only 2 cells but I now want to add a further 2 cells so I have a total of 4 cells?

    Formula now:

    =IFERROR(IF(E27>D27,"ñ",IF(E27=D27,"ó","ò")),"ó")

    Any suggestions for how to include F & G but I only want to know if the progress from the previous cell?

    ñ = Arrow Up
    ó = Stays the same
    ò = Arrow Down

  10. […] Dashboarding Fun: Display Smiley Faces in Your Excel Dashboard from Chandoo […]

Leave a Reply