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.
24 Responses
I’d suggest simply using the subtotal function and filtering the data using the Win/Loss column. You get the same results and the formula is more comprehensible.
@John
That is one option.
There are times however when you want to see the whole data table or a filtered subset and still want to produce summary reports against an unfiltered field.
Is there a particular reason why you are using a comma and the unary (–) operator for the second array in the SUMPRODUCT formula? It seems to work the same if you were to string the arrays together using the asterisk (*). The advantage is that SUMPRODUCT treats the entire string of arrays as a single array.
@Mathew
Your correct, There is no difference.
I thought it may have been easier to explain this method.
Is there a way to do this on a large set of data? As in ~100,000 rows? When I try I get an error because the formula becomes too long. It says the max length of a formula is 8,192 characters. Excel 2010.
How do I incorporate a specific text within a cell for the second array. For instance, – -(C7:C13=”Apple”)
when I chose a specific text the formula does not work.
@RB
I am not sure what is the issue as if I use the sample data in the post the following work fine
Count:
=SUMPRODUCT(SUBTOTAL(3,OFFSET(C7:C13,ROW(C7:C13)-MIN(ROW(C7:C13)),,1)), –(C7:C13=”L”))
Sum:
=SUMPRODUCT(SUBTOTAL(3,OFFSET(C7:C13,ROW(C7:C13)-MIN(ROW(C7:C13)),,1)),(C7:C13=”L”)*(D7:D13))
You may want to check that there are no leading or trailing spaces in your list of Apples
I should have given a better explanation. Heres my situation. I have a column with cells filled with names like Column 1, Column 2, Pier 1, Pier 2, etc. If the cell just contained Pier and searched for that it works. But because it has other characters in the cell its not recognizing the pier. So how can I extract specific characters of a string of text in this formula?
Hopefully this was a better explanation
Hello-
This formula works pretty well for me except that it slow down excel and prevents some of my macros from working. I was wondering if there was a way to program this in VBA so that excel isn’t always trying to recalculate it. I would like to use a push of a button to get it to run then paste in a cell.
Thanks!
I am trying to sum filtered data in a column, but would want to ignore the negative values in the column. How to go about doing this?
@Akshay
Why not just add a filter to that column to only show the values greater than zero?
The negative values are required for reporting purposes, but their effect on the total is distorting the required output. Please advise.
@Akshay
I’d suggest making a post in the Chandoo.org Forums
http://forum.chandoo.org/
Attach a sample file to simplify the task
I have this working for counting and summing, however, I have a list and for the second array, I need a criteria. That is, I’m looking for b13:b200=”01.??.??” or =left((a1,2) or something like that. These types of criteria matches do not appear to work as I get a blank as a result.
Thanks!
@Bob
As your formula b13:b200=”01.??.??” looks like you are trying to check the first day of the month of the range
What about trying Day(B13:B200)=1
Hai Experts,
i understood this formula well and working fine in MS Excel 2013
but when the same am trying to place in google Spreadsheet it shows error as
“SUMPRODUCT has mismatched range sizes. Expected row count: 1. column count: 1. Actual row count: 2014, column count: 1.” and as a result #VALUE! Appears in cell.
Can anyone please help me how would i get it done in Google Spread sheet
or is there any other formula as a substitute for this.
Thank you very much.
thanks for providing this.. but why does excel keeps on prompting Circular referencing in cell D3?
@Vivek
I don’t know
I just downloaded the file and it is working fine and not showing that error
Goto the Formulas, Calculation Options Tab and check that Calculation is set to Automatic
What version of Excel and Windows are you using ?
I know that this forum is for MS Excel, but I am trying to help someone who is working in Google Sheets. The below formula works in Excel but Google Sheets returns:
“SUMPRODUCT has mismatched range sizes. Expected row count: 1. column count: 1. Actual row count: 39000, column count: 1.” and as a result #VALUE! Appears in cell.
This is the same problem asked by Srichirin above. Does anyone know if there is a formula for Google Sheets that will replicate what MS Excel does?
=SUMPRODUCT(SUBTOTAL(3,OFFSET($C$6:$C$39500,ROW($C$6:$C$39500)-MIN(ROW($C$6:$C$39500)),,1)),- -($C$6:$C$39500=H1),($D$6:$D$39500))
Trying to find a SUMPRODUCT formula that counts the word Closed by date for the last 7 days in a filtered list.
=COUNTIF(M:M,”>”&TODAY()-7) works ok for unfiltered count Column M contains Closure dates (blank if open) and Column L is Status Open or Closed
@ Terry
Please ask the question at the Chandoo.org Forums
https://chandoo.org/forum/
Please attach a sample file to ensure a quicker more accurate answer
I used this formula and worked like a charm! But, now I’ve been requested to use it but adding not one but two criteria in the same formula. For instance the sum I was doing added negative and positive numbers. I’ve been asked to use the exact same formula but adding that only positive numbers were considered… any idea on how to do this?
How exactly do you do sum filtered cells when two criteria are need not just one?
Thank you so much brother literally I have been struggling since morning to get the sum of the filtered category, however, after reading your blog attentively i got my solution, so thanks a lot once again.