A bunch of us went to Ashtabula county and Put-in-bay island over the weekend; beautiful lake Erie beach locations on the northern side of Ohio.
We started off from Columbus on Saturday early morning, the weather wasn’t perfect as it started raining. After nearly slipping out of the ramp, I managed to get the car on to highway and we drove for nearly an hour before halting at Bellville for some breakfast. The weather got better by then, but there was some drizzle. The tulips near McDonald’s looked beautiful too.
We couldn’t help but notice that fuel prices have almost reached sky, well thankfully we weren’t stopping for a refill.
We reached Geneva on the lake by noon. A beach side village with population of 6500. Since we reached there 2-3 weeks earlier than the holiday season, the village looked even more empty with hardly anyone on the roads. We checked in to our cottage and quickly left to see the scenic Geneva state park on the lake Erie shore. The beach was bright and windy, and the waters were cold.
We left the state park after a couple of hours to eat something. We started off to visit one of the vineyards in Ashtabula county. We stopped at this beautiful looking wine tasting room and spent sometime enjoying the bright sun light and country side.
We set out to visit the famous covered bridges of Ashtabula county later. There are about 16 of these historical bridges. We could manage to see 3 of them as we kept loosing our way across the county constantly bumping into the same vineyard.
We took a pit stop near the Mechanicsville road bridge at Grand River Manor bar which apparently is famous for good food, cold beer and lousy service.
As we were leaving I captured these,
Later at night we played dumb-charades while gulping the wine we got from the winery. We crashed late into night and had a quick sleep before hitting the road next day, in search of something else to do.
After roaming to few places (mainly Cedar Point, which was closed for winter) we reached to Putin bay island. This is a 1-2 mile sized island on the lake Erie famous for its churches, laid back living style. We rented a golf cart there and roamed around the island. This gave the unique opportunity to experiment some of the finer aspects of my driving – namely accelerating while braking on turn and driving without seat belts.
We stopped at Perry peace memorial at 3 pm.
The island looked picturesque with everything looking green.
We left the island around 6 to catch the last ferry back to mainland,
Thanks to Google maps, on our way back we took a really scenic route for almost 40 miles on state roads[via OH13, CR77, OH 545, OH 603]. The road was really beautiful with bridges, tall trees and greenery on both sides. Before we could realize were back in Columbus and it was still raining when we returned home.
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...
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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