Friday 29 November 2013

Should You Use Microsoft Excel To Build Business Dashboards?

There is no doubt that demand for dashboard skills is increasing day by day by employers and it is really much valuable for you if you have great skills to build business dashboards. Nothing can be better than making such great dashboard with a widely use software just like Microsoft Excel. Basically dashboard is a type of reporting which used to visually present decisive data summary or metrics to let business owners enable a quick and efficient business decisions. This is same like a car dashboard which displays only the essential pieces of data when you are driving a car. There are a lot of dashboards around and you might have heard many dashboard names as Business Intelligence Dashboards, Performance Dashboards, Operational Dashboards,Excel Dashboards, etc.

Many of the users do not know the real power of MS Excel and rate it too low whenever it comes to make interactive dashboard reports. As requirements of business changing at very fast pace that is why need for clarify on business performance and metrics is at high demand.

There are a number of reasons why you should use Excel to build your business dashboards:

The main reason you should use Excel for Business Dashboard is because of its flexibility

You might have come across many times your manager asked you to add some extra items in dashboard, changing timings in reports, and sometimes changing the look of the data. Microsoft Excel allows you to do all these in a matter of seconds or minutes and respond to changes very quickly. So, with such flexibility you can add charts, extra metrics, can change graphs, and can also highlight the important data with the help of fonts, colors, and size. As Microsoft Excel is part of Microsoft Office Suite, so it provides ease of interaction within other Office products.

Solid Analytical Competence

With the help of Excel it is much easier to handle complex statistical calculations, with the help of many build-in functions which allow your data to be easily displayed on a dashboard.

Distribution Ease

Now-a-Days we have Excel users everywhere and it doesn't matter how good many business dashboards software are available in market to build business dashboards. There will be very few people who actually know how use such software and would be able to use that software in a usable manner. As compared to such software Microsoft Excel is much easier to use and almost everyone is familiar with Excel or at least people who are involved in business. You just need to tie it up with SharePoint and your powerful publishing platform is ready to use.

Easy To Discover And Fix Errors

With the help of Excel it is really for you to find errors in your data, you can easily find missing values and emphasize values that are irrationally low or high or values which you are not expecting in your data.

Microsoft Excel can build scalable, distributable and most of all much easy to adaptable dashboards which are really of a high quality. Unfortunately mostly people do not take advantage of full capabilities of different color schemes, fonts and chart designs that are available within Microsoft Excel.


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How To Make Dynamic Excel Charts Through Tables

We all know how tricky is to main charts when it comes to Excel. With the progression of time there are some new data points add and some exclude, which can be difficult to add these to the graph. We all also know that Excel dashboard needs dynamic charts, so whenever a new bunch of data is included the particular chart updates itself.

Most of the beginners with Excel Dashboard find it difficult to create and maintain different charts. It is because if they want to add even a single data point they have to replace all series in order to add the latest values or data. This can be much complex process, particularly when there is a plenty of data chart series in your Excel Dashboard.

As many of the novice Excel Dashboard designers do not have idea how to add and maintain dynamic graphs, what they do they make use of placeholders for data which will come in the future within their Business Dashboard. So, it means there will be no need to modify the chart until or unless all the placeholders are filled, but it is not a very useful Dashboard Layout for a number of reasons. Main reason is that it generates a lot of unused empty space in your dashboard chart as placeholder needs further data to fill and all the spaces should be filled for better Dashboard Chart. That is why it is not a good idea to develop many data placeholders virtually in any Excel Business Dashboard.


The perfect thing for any Excel dashboard template can be to create it dynamically. Just imagine how amazing this will be if you simply add values and your chart updates by itself. Isn't it outstanding? And even if you are a beginner you can do it easily.

Here is how you can create a dynamic chart in Excel with just a few steps!

There are a number of ways to come up with a dynamic Excel chart. Here is the easiest and fastest way, but there are some more complex ways that are required to manage such activities where tables are not the best choice.

Even if you are a beginner you can easily create a dynamic chart in Microsoft Excel 2007 and 2010. While using these versions you just need to place all the information within an Excel table before start making chart and afterward the chart will be dynamically update when newer data series will be adding in.

If you will update your data series within a table which you created before chart, the Excel Chart will become dynamic and will be updated automatically without any Excel VBA coding or any complicated formulas.

Isn't it so easy and simple? Using of tables for different dynamic charts is so simple and easy to implement. You just need to do a little bit of work and it will be an ease for you in future as well.

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