Aeternus Singapore » Dashboard in Excel

A gallery of Beautiful Charts for Excel part 1

CH Leong — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:03:54 +0000

I have scoured the web and magazines for beautiful charts designs that we can use in our Excel reports. This will be part of a gallery I am creating. Do visit this blog for regular updates.

Black backgrounds can work with charts!

Good use of callouts to highlight a message.

Note the use of consistent colours.

Black, white, red and blue. What drama!

Ministry of Manpower Unemployment Dashboard

CH Leong — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:55:07 +0000

MOM’s website (www.mom.gov.sg) contains a wealth of labor data. An example is on unemployment rates in Singapore. I took two sets of data: Unemployment Rate (Seasonally Adjusted) & Resident Long-Term Unemployment Rate (Non-Seasonally Adjusted).

They look like this. As individual charts, they may not present a strong overall picture.

Ministry of Manpower Unemployment charts

I redesigned the presentation into a dashboard using Excel 2003. You can download a copy here: Excel Productivity Cafe Files.

The effect of a well designed dashboard is you are able to survey more data in a glance, and make quicker assessments for faster decisions. I did this dashboard in 20mins, you can do it too. You can view more details about our Dashboarding Course here.

Magazine quality charts in Excel 2003. How AEternus do it.

CH Leong — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:40:42 +0000

I’d like to show you how we run our Excel Charting courses in Aeternus. I promise that after attending our Excel Charting course, your Excel charting skills will definately go up by several notches. As an example, I plucked out a pretty line chart from the Economist Magazine August 2009 issue.

Line chart from Economist Aug 2009 issue

Imagine you can create such charts directly in Excel!

The benefits:

Refreshing way to present charts.
You do not need expensive charting software.
Explain your charts to management with your commentary.
Carry this skill everywhere you go.

The process:

Step 1: I started with data in a typical worksheet.

Sample figures in a Excel 2003 worksheet

Step 2: Using the above figures, I insert a typical Excel line chart.

Step 3: We will coach you through detail steps to produce this Excel chart. Clearly, the results speak for themselves.

Once this chart is created, you simply need to update those numbers and new charts are redrawn. You can also update your expert comments right inside the chart!

New series of Excel 2003 charts are easily created

Step 4: We don’t stop here. AEternus will build upon your newly acquired charting skills to create entire management dashboards.

You can view more details about our Dashboarding Course here.