Do you need VBA to create an Excel dashboard? Should you take the plunge and go beyond Excel formulas? Well, I think you should, but feel free to disagree. Charley Kyd, commenting on my review of his e-book, disagrees: As a consultant, I visited too many clients where an Excel user had written some macros, … Read more
The other day I was reading Dundas’ whitepaper “Best Practices for Building Digital Dashboards” (PDF) [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][update: this whitepaper is no longer available] and you know what? What they say makes a lot … Read more
If you google for “Excel dashboards”, 6 out of the first 10 results link to Charley Kyd’s ExcelUser website or some of his affiliates. MrExcel calls Charley Kyd “the king of Excel dashboards”. There is a good reason for that. Three years ago, Charley Kyd published an e-book, Dashboard Reporting with Excel, probably one of … Read more
Excel is a great (but underrated) BI tool. Several BI vendors gave up fighting it and offer Excel add-ins as front-ends for their BI solutions. So, if you want to create a dashboard you should consider Excel, since it really offers better functionalities than many other applications for a fraction of the cost and development … Read more
Funny story… I was playing with domain names today, trying to register names for future projects like “exceldashboards.com”. Unfortunately, this is already taken. And who owns it? Business Objects, the makers of Crystal Xcelsius (remember my Xcelsius dashboard series?). Type exceldashboards.com (I refuse to add a link) and you’ll be redirected to the xcelsius home … Read more
I tried to create a Crystal XCelsius version of my Demographic Dashboard and failed miserably. But what about a new spreadsheet version? That should work, right? Wrong. I downloaded StarOffice 8 and just linked the pivot table (“datapilot”) to the Access population database via ODBC and waited… and waited… and waited… and finally was able … Read more
This is the last post in a series where I examined the possibility of creating a Crystal Xcelsius dashboard using my Demographic Dashboard as a benchmark. I’ll discuss here my overall conclusions. I must say from the start that I am very disappointed. Let’s start by the data set and Xcelsius integration with Excel. I … Read more
Excel dashboards and executive reports are powerful, fairly easy to design and a great way to improve your Excel and data visualization skills. Because of its flexibility, you can virtually design any dashboard in Excel exactly the way you, or the users, imagined. And, best of all, you may want to implement it yourself or … Read more