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.

Drive your business with a management dashboard

• What if there is a dashboard that puts you in the driver seat of your business instead of being drowned by numbers?
• What if you can understand in a glance all the key business drivers of your business operation?
• What if you have total control of the publishing process using a spreadsheet instead of a $10,000 reporting software?

These are the key questions that I asked myself before deciding to create such a training program.  The questions lead to a logical answer: Why not create dashboards in Excel?  Excel is rich in database features and its easy to create charts in worksheets.  Excel simply has a lot of untapped potential for applications and it seemed like a perfect platform to create management dashboards.

Sales activity is the life blood for all businesses.  People who are responsible for sales must have their fingers on this vital pulse at all times.

Traditionally, managers read sales reports in tables of numbers.  Imagine if all the sales data is presented like below.  It summarizes 40 thousand sales records and presents the results all in a single dashboard. This dashboard shows:

• Sales information are divided by regions and placed side by side for Regional managers.
• Tiny sparklines show various historical sale trends and is compared with historical forecasts in blue for an entire year.
• Current sales performances are immediately compared with Sales KPI levels to judge performance levels.

The great thing about using dashboards is that sales results are communicated clearly and immediately.  It can align with the way people think and act so decisions can be made quicker!

A Sales Dashboard in Excel

Such dashboards are not difficult to build in Excel.  Sales transaction can be extracted from the backend database systems and the numbers are simply plotted by Excel charts. Of course the analyst needs to follow certain dashboard design principles.

I came across a stock maket chart in Straits Times a couple of days ago. Just for the fun of it, I create one in Excel within 5 minutes .

Chart from Straits Times

Chart in Excel

Painless Business Reporting in Excel

I have noted that generating business reports in Excel has many common problems across companies though my years of teaching Excel and working as a business analyst in a large corporation.

An analyst without sufficient knowledge of Excel often labors at each stage of business reporting. Compounding this problem, reports are often expected on short notices and mistakes are common.

Motivated by this situation, I’ve put together some of the best tricks I’ve learned and applied them successfully in an operational environment. Each task in this book contains detailed instructions to solve typical reporting problems in a quick and accurate manner. An analyst with a general proficiency of Excel should be able to take these ideas as recipes to automate many transaction based business reports to improve productivity, reduce reporting errors and enhance reporting value to managements.

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).

Chart from WSJ

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.

WSJ 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.

Bullet charts from Wall Street Journal

Bullet chart in Excel

I know the idea of creating dashboards 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!

Non-traditional Excel chart

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?

Email: enquiries@aeternus.sg or
Call 83023887 for details.