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Tag: form controls

KPI performance charts & dashboards – 43 alternatives (contest entries)

Hello all, prepare to be amazed! Here are 43 creative, fun & informative ways to visualize KPI data.

About a month ago, I asked you to visualize KPI data. We received 65 entries for this contest. After carefully reviewing the entries, our panel of judges have discarded 22 of them due to poor charting choices, errors or just plain data dumps. We are left with 43 amazing entries, each creatively analyzed the data and presented results in a powerful way.

How to read this post?

This is a fairly large post. If you are reading this in email or news-reader, it may not look properly. Click here to read it on chandoo.org.

  1. Each entry is shown in a box with the contestant’s name on top. Entries are shown in alphabetical order of contestant’s name.
  2. You can see a snapshot of the entry and more thumbnails below.
  3. The thumb-nails are click-able, so that you can enlarge and see the details.
  4. You can download the contest entry workbook, see & play with the files.
  5. You can read my comments at the bottom.
  6. At the bottom of this post, you can find a list of key charting & dashboard design techniques. Go thru them to learn how to create similar reports at work.

Thank you

Thank you very much for all the participants in this contest. I have thoroughly enjoyed exploring your work & learned a lot from them. I am sure you had fun creating these too.

So go ahead and enjoy the entries.

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.

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 […]

How to highlight overdue items [video]

We, adults can’t escape three things:

  1. Deadlines
  2. Demanding bosses (replace with customers or nagging spouses or naughty kids)
  3. Taxes

While I can’t help you with demanding bosses or taxes, when it comes to deadlines, I have the right tool for you.

A tracker that highlights all overdue items so that you know where to focus your attention.

Let’s learn how to use awesome powers of Excel to find-out which items are due. You can apply these concepts to nail down over due invoices, pending project tasks or scheduling workforce.

Are you an analyst? Use these 25 shortcuts & tricks to boost your productivity

Analyst’s life is busy. We have to gather data, clean it up, analyze it, dig the stories buried in it, present them, convince our bosses about the truth, gather more evidence, run tests, simulations or scenarios, share more insights, grab a cup of coffee and start all over again with a different problem.

So today let me share with you 25 shortcuts, productivity hacks and tricks to help you be even more awesome.

Doing Cost Benefit Analysis in Excel – a case study

Imagine you are the in-charge of finance department at Hogwarts. So one fine day, while you are practicing the spells, Dumbledore walks in to your office and says, “Our electricity bills are way too high. As the muggles don’t accept wizard money, we have to find a way to reduce our power consumption.”

So you summoned the previous 12 month utility bills to examine energy consumption patterns, and pretty soon you realized that most of the electricity consumption is due to the light bulbs. You suddenly have a brilliant idea. Why not replace the light bulbs with a variety that consumes low power? A light bulb moment indeed.

Your next step is to figure out what varieties of light bulbs are out there. Fortunately this is easier than catching a snitch in a game of quidditch. A quick search revealed that there are 3 types of light bulbs:

  • Regular incandescent bulbs (the kind Hogwarts currently uses)
  • Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFL)
  • Light Emitting Diode bulbs (LED)

Now your job is to do a cost benefit analysis of these options and pick one.