This article is written by Alex Kerin from Data Driven Consulting.
“When expensive dashboard software doesn’t work, do it with Excel” stated Stephen Few back in 2006. This was before the release of Tableau, and some of the other solutions now available for visualizing your data, but Excel remains a great choice for creating dashboards when you extend it with sparkline add-ins, clever chart hacks, and VBA or (relatively) simple formulas.
Excel however isn’t regarded as a “serious” business intelligence tool for delivery of your metrics and charts. Perhaps some of this is that users expect dashboards to be deployed on the web not on a locally installed application.
Today we will learn how to export excel dashboards to web pages.
Exporting Excel Dashboards to Web:
When it comes to exporting dashboards to web, 4 options come to my mind. I’ll quickly review these, culminating in a look at a new option – Excel 2010 and Microsoft’s online version of Office – Docs.com
- Save your workbook as a web page. Text in cells is converted to text in html tables, while charts and other shapes are converted to images. Excel offers two formats – mhtml and normal html. The mhtml version saves as a single file with the images encoded as text. Only IE can natively handle mhtml file while plug-ins exist for some of the other popular browsers. The normal html file option creates a folder full of images. By choosing this option you obviously lose any interactivity you had via drop down forms, pivot tables, or VBA. The conversion of charts/shapes to images is imperfect, leading to fuzzy edged images, and in my (beta) version of 2010 sometimes resulted in blank or missing images. You also lose font type information in 2007, so if you’re using any special fonts to create in-cell charts they will end up looking odd. Excel 2010 preserves font information (as long as the font is installed on the user’s machine). Personally, I don’t think it’s a great option – you may as well just:
[click here for a larger version] - Take a screenshot and post it to your website. You could use contol-printscreen to take a snapshot of your dashboard. As this just dumps the screen to the clipboard you may want to use a screen capture tool which can select a portion of the screen and save it to a file easily. You’ll want to make sure you crop appropriately, for looks, and so that your boss doesn’t see your taskbar with your browser on Facebook. Excel 2010 has a new screenshot option, but that’s for inserting screenshots, not saving them out. You can’t save a file as jpg/png like you can in Powerpoint, but you could save as a PDF and upload that. But what if you want more interactivity?
- Publish using Sharepoint. Sharepoint is an MS server platform that among (lots of) other things, allows publication of Excel workbooks to the web. While some interactivity is preserved (like pivot tables), many features are not (VBA, form dropdowns, images, and shapes). As some sparkline add-ins use VBA to generate a shape that depicts the data, even the static shape will not be shown as it will be stripped out. Other add-ins use VBA and a special font to depict the shape. As Excel 2010 preserves font information, these may show on a Sharepoint server, assuming the user has installed the font. Of course though, they will not update as VBA is not allowed. Linking to external data sources is allowed, so you can use your OLAP cubes or whatever else. Sharepoint is a viable option, but requires servers and licenses, neither of which come cheap. What other options are there then?
- Docs.com and Excel 2010. Docs.com is Microsoft’s online version of the Office applications. At the time of writing (July 2010), it was still in private beta. Oddly, MS has chosen to release it with deep ties to Facebook (login, posting to your wall, and sharing documents amongst friends). I honestly have never needed to share a document with a friend, and equally I’m not friends with the people that I do want to share documents with. Despite this (and I’m sure plenty will change as Docs evolves past beta), Docs.com offers some interesting opportunities for web deployment of dashboards. It still suffers from no VBA or ability to show shapes – I suspect that docs.com is running in a Sharepoint environment, BUT, and this is a big but, Docs.com was built with Office 2010 in mind. This means that the sparklines new to Excel 2010 show up, and update when values change. Take a tour of one of my workbooks on docs.com here.
Problems with Excel Dashboards uploaded to Docs.com
You’ll see on the example that there are several warnings thrown up – I left some shapes in the file before uploading just to show you what the warning message looked like. Linking to external data is not allowed (as you would expect, compared to Sharepoint where you control the servers), so you’ll have to be clever about how you update the dashboards. If your goal is to deploy using Docs.com, you’ll probably design your dashboard with this in mind, making good use of pivot tables for example.
I could envisage using Docs.com in the following manner:
- Develop a great dashboard in 2010 that instantly makes the user aware of any problems (but you’re doing that already aren’t you?) and upload it to Docs.com
- Share the document with your users, and upload a new file as data is added to the dashboard
- For any interactivity (e.g. simple data exploration to further investigate problems), the user can download the document – even though things like dropdown list boxes are not shown on docs.com, they are preserved and will show and work on the local version (VBA is still a no-no as you can’t upload a xlsm file)
I would like to see some changes with Docs.com – for example being able to hide the “Who you are sharing this with” column, allowing full-screen viewing of just the sheet, and sorting out the sharing outside of Facebook.
Now this method will not be suitable for sensitive information where deploying to the cloud (albeit with careful sharing of access) would not be appropriate, but the concept of using Excel 2010 and Docs.com offers some interesting opportunities for web-deployed Excel dashboards, and for using on websites that teach us to become awesome in Excel…
Added by Chandoo:
How do you Export Excel Dashboards to Your Audience?
Do you save the dashboards as PDFs or email the workbook or save as web page? What is your way of exposing the dashboard to the audience?
Please share using comments.
More Resources on Dashboards:
Checkout our dashboards page which has lots of links, templates, downloads and tutorials on creating excel dashboards.
Thank you Alex
I thank Alex for sharing these beautiful ideas with all of us. Exporting dashboards is a growing need and we all could use help like this to become better. Thank you Alex.
About Alex Kerin:
Alex runs a kickass consulting business at Data Driven Consulting. He shares a lot of innovative ideas and information on dashboards, visualization and Excel thru his blog regularly. And of course, he is awesome with excel.
29 Responses to “Customer Service Dashboard using Excel [Dashword Week]”
Looks good, Mara. Keep up the good work!
Thx Mara, your work is great, congratulations...
wow ! Great stuff Mara !!
I am amazed on the work you did !
What I like about your dashboard
1. The first impression is the colors used. Very smart use of colors that matches each other, easy on the eye - make people wants to find out more !
2. Clear message shown for the tweetboard for Quick overview on the state of situation.
3. Use of creative titles for your charts "Information Desk".
4. Clear and uncluttered charts. Gives reader a clear perspective with good use of charts colors too.
5. Good use of Legend to describe what color meant "Highest Sales out of the three months"
6. Of course, good use of Check boxes and Slider bar to offer interactiveness on your charts.
Suggestions
1. You may want to consider formatting your Y and X axis labels to show thousands, in $500K format instead of $500,000, so you can even made your chart look much neater.
2. Budget Variant Chart - This one is special...I took a second look and try to understand it. I am not sure if this is the best chart to visualize Sales VS Budget and Variances. And the Variance of 16.19% is positive, so u may want to use conditional formatting to make it green color, red if negative.
Overall is Great Work and Great Effort !!! Keep it up and I am so proud of you !
Francis Chin
http://www.francischin.com
Great Work Maya, just wondering if "5" Scrollable list of various gift shop items, can compare the previous 2 and current month selected in the above picklist, just one more suggestion if we can use top 5 gift category by using donut and bar mix chart to show sales mix for different months
Chandoo I would like to thank you for posting such helpful tricks for creating dashboards, I have learned a lot from your KPI Dashboard demo, I have created one dashboard to compare performce of Sales Associates, thaks a lot again
Thanks for the idea! Great job! You are giving me a lot of inspiratons!
Thanks everyone for the nice comments. I'm such a novice at this so I was so grateful for Chandoo's class and for everyone who submits ideas on his blog.
Francis: Thanks so much for your comments. You're an inspiration. For the budget variance chart, I actually got that idea from one of Chandoo's post on budget vs actual. There was one that was simple and easy to read so I learned how to do that and made it dynamic. I'm open to any other ideas you have for budget vs actual. I'm always looking for ways to improve.
Sabrina: Thank you for you for your suggestion on the top 5.
Dear Mara,
Great work.
But i one suggestion regarding the INFORMATION DESK graph is consist of month but which year it belong is not there if it would be there it would be great.
Warm Regards
Bhushan Sabbani
+91 98208 26012
Thanks for this idea... Great Stuff !!
Excellent dashboard Mara.
The best I like about the dashboard is the choice of colors. They are cool and not distracting. Thanks for sharing the file.
@Chandoo
Thanks for the dashboard week Chandoo. I am learnt a lot in the last 2 days. I am excited over the next 3 days! 🙂
Regards,
Ravi.
Great work Mara ! Thanks for sharing .
Mara, I liked the line, "Need to be more helpful." Our government needs to print this line, laminate it and post it in all government offices for the staff to see.
Hi there, i have been recently visiting this blog it is really great, the best one for Excel, wish Chandoo great success ahead.
I have one query, if you protect the data sheet the chart with the checkbox gives and error saying the data is protected and cannot be modified, is there a way around. This is cause if we want to publish this to someone who should only see it and do no changes to the data, is it possible please guide.
This could be a silly but bear me i am novice to excel 🙂
Thanks.
nice work.
inspired me a lot, working on few dashboard projects...
[...] Customer Service Dashboard in Excel 14,326 [...]
[...] Customer Service Dashboard Example [...]
dear mara
looks great .any reason why you have not used the bullet chart for the actual vs target chart.on the whole it is simple and elegant .jay.
Dear Chandoo,
The word Dashboard in the heading is misspelt.
Wow. Very Nice work Mara. Next week I am going to take the Course, I will try to post my work here.
Thank you so much for your helpful blog. Always appreciated your tips and tricks.
I am proud that you belongs to our Vizag City.
The above comment, I forgot mentioned about Chandoo, those two paras is about Chandoo. 😀
Thank you Mara!
Thx Mara, your work is great, congratulations…
Great Work Mara!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hi Chandoo,
I had been following your blogs for tips and tricks on excel. I am working with Media agency and we collect the data. Now this data has several parameters based on several legends. For eg Class A - legend color red, classB - legend color green and so on. Class A has several characteristics and parameters and heading etc. Now everytime we gather data and make pivot then based on the data in the pilot tables - top 10 we need to insert those in charts manually and also need to change the colors of legends and also. We create nearly 300 slides every month sector wise and it takes nearly our 4-5 days in doing that. Do you have any sample dashboard which will be helpfull to us and we can create it in a day.
Thanks really amazing one,
it helped me in desgining OTACE report
Regards
Gowravan M
9980651792
Awesome Job done here .............
very good master piece but wont to know if you can design KPI's for a financial institution. Thank you
I need help to make performance for our company
we have about 10 products from 5 years old