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.


Source