CP044: My first dashboard was a failure!!!
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In the 44th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s talk about failures.
What is in this session?
In this podcast,
- Book announcement about Dashboards for Excel
- Story of my first ever dashboard
- Important lessons – Requirement Analysis for dashboards
- Resources for creating awesome dashboards
- Podcasts
- Books
- Courses
Book Announcement: Dashboards for Excel is launching on 15th September
Dashboards for Excel – what is it?
As the name suggests this book is a handy guide for anyone preparing dashboards, management reports and business intelligence workbooks using Excel. The key benefits are,
- Learn the visualization tools, charts, tables, and graphs important to management.
- Understand what management doesn’t want to see in a report
- Turn around dashboards faster and cheaper than ever before
- Understand the key role dashboards play in an organization
- Analyze real-world dashboards to apply important features to your own organization
- Utilize understated, but powerful, Excel formulas and VBA code
- Avoid common pitfalls in Excel development and dashboard creation
- Get started with the Excel data model, PowerPivot, and Power Query
As you can see, this is an advanced Excel book with lots of examples, case studies and practical tips.
How to create cascading drop downs in Excel – video
Cascading drop downs enhance usability of your dashboards & interactive workbooks. A cascading drop-down is a 2 or more level selection mechanism. When you have 100s of selection choices, instead of creating one massive drop down or combo-box, you can set up multiple levels of drop downs, so that users can narrow down their selection. For example, users can select Country, State and then City using cascading drop downs.
There are many ways to setup cascading drop downs. You can use formulas coupled with either data validation or form controls. You can also use Slicers. In this video we will review these techniques.
How to use GETPIVOTDATA with Excel Pivot Tables
Pivot tables are very powerful analysis tools. They can summarize vast amounts of data with just few clicks. But they are lousy when it comes to output. Imagine the horror of putting a pivot table right inside your beautiful dashboard. One refresh could ruin the layout and create half-an-hour extra work for you.
How to combine the power of pivot tables with elegance of your dashboards?
The answer is: GETPIVOTDATA()
Dashboard best practice: Highlight user selection [video]
Here is a best practice to improve your dashboard usability. If you have an interactive dashboard, highlight user selections thru conditional formatting.
Check out below quick video to understand what this means.
A simple trick to make your dashboards user friendly [video]
Whenever you have a dashboard that is quite long or spans across multiple worksheet tabs, it can be hard to use. Here is a simple trick to make your dashboards user friendly. If your dashboard has form controls, create duplicate sets of them and place them in locations where users are looking. For example, If your […]
Format faster with paste special & double click [video]
Making your workbooks, charts, dashboards & presentations beautiful is a time consuming process. It is a mix of art & craft. Naturally, we spend hours polishing that important slideshow or visualization. But do you know about simple features in Excel that can save you a lot of time and help you create gorgeous output?