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Tag: power pivot

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.

Introduction to Slicers – What are they, how to use them, tips, advanced techniques & interactive reports using Excel Slicers

Slicers are one of my favorite feature in Excel. And here is a quick demo to show why they are my favorite.

Slicers – what are they?

Slicers are visual filters. Using a slicer, you can filter your data (or pivot table, pivot chart) by clicking on the type of data you want.

For example, let’s say you are looking at sales by customer profession in a pivot report. And you want to see how the sales are for a particular region. There are 2 options for you do drill down to an individual region level.

  1. Add region as report filter and filter for the region you want.
  2. Add a slicer on region and click on the region you want.

With a report filter (or any other filter), you will have to click several times to pick one store. With slicers, it is a matter of simple click.

Read more to learn all about slicers

How to insert a blank column in pivot table?

We all know pivot table functionality is a powerful & useful feature. But it comes with some quirks. For example, we cant insert a blank row or column inside pivot tables.

So today let me share a few ideas on how you can insert a blank column.

But first let’s try inserting a column

Imagine you are looking at a pivot table like above.

And you want to insert a column or row. Go ahead and try it.