Analysts don’t be shy. Get Noticed!

Most business analysts aren’t the outgoing types. They would prefer to work quietly in the background, hoping their attention to detail and accuracy to numbers are appreciated. I assure you those attributes are certainly valued, but it won’t win you any awards. WHY? Because you are playing by the rules. Your reports are accurate, the numbers are right and management expects them to be so. This expectation for the same performance will pigeonhole you as “GOOD”, but you are not “REMARKABLE”.

How to make that elevated grade? As analysts, you are in a unique position to draw data from many data sources both historical and current. Your work is seen by top management. What if you could:

Present old data in a new insightful way?

Current sales revenues in boring tables? Change the rules, break them in fact. Why not include entire year’s sales performance in a tiny sparkline? Give commentaries to past and present. Place your insights right where your bosses can see them (don’t forget to put your name at the lower right corner).

PS: Have fun along the way.

Problem of Labour Intensive Reporting in Excel

If you are a business analyst like I was, chances are you create and compile tons of reports in Excel. The business of generating reports is a business itself. The process of collecting your raw data and distilling it into the report are routine and involves many delicate steps. In other words, reporting is laborious. The labor involved will become a natural limit to the amount of meaningful insights you can generate.

Added to this work volume, managers often demand reports to be sent on time, on a regular frequency.  The higher the reporting frequency, the higher the workload.  Any wonder you need to have multiple heads and arms to deal with this?

Learn more about our Excel training course Painless Business Reporting in Excel.

Create Executive Dashboards in Excel

Most analysts know how to create charts in Excel. Getting them to look good is another matter. It’s hard to imagine you can create magazine quality dashboards like these without dedicated software.

Charts like these ARE done in Excel. Excel has been overlooked as a platform to deliver dashboard reports simply because the techniques are not obvious or well known.

This 2 day workshop program is aimed at imparting the skills to create amazing charts and dashboards for your management audience. Design dashboards to show company operations at a glance to your board or investors.

Heavy coverage will be given on the concept and the practical methods of creating dashboards so that participants are immediately productive when they return to work.

More Dashboarding Ideas:
• You can place them in your routine emails, upload it to the web, publish it to SharePoint servers, put them in PowerPoint presentations. Spread your message. Reach out to those who needs to know!

• It can be done in Excel, so why not experiment? It’s cheap and risk free. Don’t wait for management to decide. Bring new dashboard projects to your management.

• Everyone has the same tools. Why not compete with each other to come up with the best dashboard designs?

Learn more about Creating Dashboards in Excel.

Who are we?

We are not a big company. We are not New Horizons that offers a huge selection of courses which satisfies everyone. We can’t and won’t do so. If we do, we wouldn’t be able to create off-market content tailored to unique problems that people face in businesses.

Work with multiple Excel worksheets at the same time

Imagine when you open a workbook, multiple windows will be opened and each window allows you to work on 1 worksheet and they get arranged nicely across a large LCD monitor.  Sounds like a dream?  Well this is easy to do.

1. Open any workbook and click on Window->New Window.
2. Do this 3 more times.
3. Click Window->Arrange. Choose “Tiled” from the Arrange Window dialog box.

At this point you should see 4 windows all pointing to the same workbook. Use each window on the screen to access different worksheets, effectively you are working on 4 sheets at the same time!  Any save command you perform will save all your work to the same workbook.  And get this: next time you open the same file, you get this set up just where you left off!

Dashboard ideas from Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal have a lot of good looking charts which I draw my dashboard ideas. You can hardly find any in BusinessWeek or Fortune nowadays.  The chart from WSJ below shows a complex story of European bank revenues from equity capital markets deals(ECM).

To create such a chart in Excel, I placed a stacked column chart on Excel’s primary axis and a line chart on the secondary axis.  To replicate the exact look, I applied more chart formatting tricks.  The result is largely faithful to the original. I am trying to demostrate Excel’s capability to produce professional looking charts and dashboards.

Bullet chart in Excel

A bullet chart is a relatively new kind of chart invented by Stephen Few.  I was pleasantly surprised to see one in a recent copy of  The Wall Street Journal.  A bullet chart looks like a column chart “within” a column chart.  It is a great way to compare 2 series of data together. For example, sales figures from 2 different years.

During our “Creating Executive Dashboards in Excel” course, I’m going to talk in detail how to create such bullet charts in Excel. They are a very compact way to display key performance indicators (KPIs).  It can compare actual performance with “Poor Performance”, “Satisfactory Performance” and “Excellent Performance” levels all within a tiny bullet chart.

Learn more about our Excel training course Creating Dashboards in Excel.

A magazine quality chart in Excel

I know the idea of creating beautiful charts in Excel seems unfamiliar, but I assure you Excel is a very capable platform to do so. At first sight, the chart below does not look like it comes from Excel. But it did!