Discover how to create an Excel dashboard, using graphs and charts, and power up key business insights that can help to make data-driven decisions.
A dashboard can be a great way to pull together key pieces of information, helping you see the bigger picture and understand how your business is performing.
Excel dashboards are easy to create, customise and share, giving you data-driven insights to help you make smarter decisions.
If you want to view all of your key information in one place in a visually impactful and easy-to-understand format, Excel Dashboards are the way to go.
Excel Dashboard Applications
The range of potential applications and uses for Excel Dashboards, charts and graphics is enormous, and the entire system is designed to work seamlessly with your new or existing spreadsheets, automating updates and changes to the data portrayed within your constructed charts and graphs themselves.
As a reporting tool, Excel Dashboards are an excellent way to improve your data’s readability and visual impact, enabling you to view all of your key information in one place and compare it against set criteria or other information.
Additionally, because of the innate flexibility of Excel as a software package, you can design and display your Excel Dashboard and associated graphs and charts in virtually any way you want.
What Is An Excel Dashboard?
An Excel Dashboard is a reporting tool that consolidates and displays key business data in one place. It gives you an at-a-glance view of how your business is doing at any given time, showing how various aspects or elements are performing against set criteria.
Excel Dashboards often feature interactive charts and graphs that link back to the data in your spreadsheets, automatically updating when new information is added. This ensures you always have access to the most up-to-date information when making decisions.
7 Easy Steps To Creating An Excel Dashboard
To create an Excel Dashboard you will need to:
1. Select the data that you want to use in your dashboard.
2. Format and organise the data in such a way that it can be effectively used for reporting.
3. Create charts and graphs to represent the data in a visually appealing way.
4. Design the layout of your dashboard and how you want it to look.
5. Customize how the data is represented in the charts and graphs.
6. Link the dashboard elements to the data in your spreadsheets.
7. Share and distribute your dashboard when it is finished.
The Excel Experts can help you plan and execute a range of Excel Dashboards, tailored to your business needs. Contact us today for professional Excel advice and support.
Designing Dashboards
Maybe you require a specific design for your dashboard, or you want to display a selection of key metrics in a simple format. Whatever it is that you need, the Excel Experts can help tailor a dashboard that meets your business needs.
We work with you to plan how the data should be visualised, and how you want to display it. Our team of Excel Experts are highly trained and experienced in creating dashboards that make sense out of data, enabling you to make smart, informed decisions.
Some sample layouts and dashboards may include :
Heat maps
Heat maps can show how different factors are performing against each other.
Comparative charts and graphs
Allowing you to compare how different elements are performing such as how your website visitors are coming from different sources.
Gauge charts
Highlight how closely a metric is to reaching its target. This is great for tracking your progress towards a specific goal.
Live data feeds
Ensuring you always have access to the most up-to-date information, live feeds can be embedded in your dashboard to update when new data is added.
Scorecards
Quickly view how you are performing against set criteria such as how you are tracking against your goals for the month or how many leads you have acquired.
Using Dashboard Templates
If you don’t have the time or resources to design a custom dashboard, then a template might be the best option for you.
There are a variety of pre-made dashboard templates available, allowing you to quickly and easily create a dashboard that meets your needs.
Popular dashboard templates include :
• KPI dashboard template
• Sales dashboard template
• Financial dashboard template
• Marketing dashboard template
Excel dashboards not only give you an at-a-glance view of how your business is performing, but they also enable you to quickly identify trends and opportunities.
Let’s dive a bit deeper into some of these common dashboards.
Key Performance Indicators or KPI Dashboards
- Excel Dashboards can be created and automated to deliver a specific type of business data directly to the appropriate audience.
- Key Performance Indicator Dashboards or KPI Dashboards provide an excellent example of some of the potential applications of Excel Dashboards for displaying data and charts.
- The Dashboard or interface itself can be fine-tuned to provide a highly intuitive, interactive user experience, saving clicks, time and money.
Once you begin to use Excel Dashboards and understand their potential applications – including how they can be used to produce the kind of metrics your users expect – there are three major elements to dashboards that you need to learn to understand and work with:
- How to import or transfer data into your Dashboard.
- How to manage the data within the Dashboard, such as linking it to Dashboard applications, like graphs, charts and tables from within your excel workbook.
- How to create a design and format for your Dashboard report that reflects what you want to achieve and expresses it coherently.
The Excel Experts can help you make the most of Excel Dashboards, automate your user systems, set up a new Dashboard report, or train you and your team on the full range of applications for Excel Dashboards and how to use them.
The Excel Forecast Dashboard
Excel Dashboards are capable of generating highly complex forms of data interpolation and extrapolated forecasts based on the data that you are using.
You can read more about Excel Modelling Simulations, which are closely related fields.
Excel Dashboards are very flexible, but in order to get the best out of them and ensure that they perform as you expect them to, there is more to it than simply pasting some data into a table and adding a few graphs or charts.
Dashboards also need to be updated and maintained, and in order to control the cost and manpower hours involved in performing such tasks, you need to impose a structure and framework for your data.
Directly connecting the data source to the originating spreadsheet is generally the best and simplest way to achieve this, which may involve integrating your Excel Dashboard with another database, spreadsheet or application.
Creating Interactive Charts Using Excel Dashboards
Excel Dashboards can be used to create interactive charts with user-friendly front-ends for data tables and database management.
This is an integral element of effective, streamlined data reporting and analysis and can help you to make short work of updating and fine-tuning recurring reports.
Automating updates for the charts, tables and graphs created out of your spreadsheet data allows you to save time and money with dashboards, enabling you to create dynamic charts with ranges that update themselves automatically in real-time whenever you add, change or remove data within the range.
Pie Charts & Line Charts
Excel charts are one of the most powerful tools for presenting data in a visually appealing and easy-to-understand format.
Pie charts and line charts are two of the most popular types of visualisations used in Microsoft Excel Dashboards and they can be easily created using data from spreadsheets.
For example, a pie chart can be used to compare data and highlight how different parts of the total add up and how much each part contributes to the whole.
A line chart can be used to show how a certain metric has changed over time, allowing users to see how data points evolve over time.
Whatever method you use to present your data, dashboards can be used to represent a wide range of data in an engaging and accessible way, enabling users to easily understand how the data interacts and how it changes over time.
Pivot Tables & Data Filtering
Pivot tables and data filtering are two excellent tools for managing large amounts of data in Excel.
Using pivot tables, you can easily group and summarise data in order to quickly find the answers that you need.
Data filtering is also a great tool for sorting through data quickly. It enables you to filter out the information that is not important and to view only the data that is relevant.
Both pivot tables and data filtering can be used to help you create more effective Excel Dashboards for your business!
What Is A Web Analytics Dashboard?
Some clients prefer to utilise the power of web analytics dashboards to interpret their data.
A web analytics dashboard is a powerful tool for understanding how your website performs, how visitors interact with it and how they engage with the content.
With a web analytics dashboard, you can track how visitors interact with your website through data such as how much time they spend on each page, how many pages they visit and how often they return to the site.
This powerful tool can help you to make well-informed decisions about how to improve the overall performance of your website and how to optimise it for increased user engagement and conversions.
Using Complex Data
Whatever set of data you have, Excel Dashboards can help you to structure and manage it effectively.
With complex data sets, dashboards enable you to process multiple sets of data in one go and to quickly identify correlations, patterns and trends in your data.
You can also use Excel Dashboards to help you aggregate data from multiple sources and to create customised reports that make the most of your data.
Excel Dashboards are an invaluable tool for helping you to make sense of large and complex data sets. With these powerful tools, you can quickly identify patterns in your data and gain valuable insights into how it is behaving.
Final Thoughts: How To Create An Excel Dashboard
Creating an effective Excel Dashboard doesn’t have to be a daunting task. By following the steps outlined above, you can easily create a dashboard that will help you to manage, analyse and interpret your data in an efficient and effective manner.
With the right tools, Excel Dashboards can be a powerful way to gain insights from your data and make the most of it. So don’t wait – get started today!
And if you feel like you require help with any aspect of this blog post, whether that’s setting up dashboards in Excel or how to interpret the data, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Our team is here to help!
FAQs
Yes! Excel Dashboards are free to use and you don’t need any extra software to create them. Just log in to your Office 365 account, open up Excel and you can get started right away.
No, Excel Dashboards are designed to be user friendly and easy to use, even for beginners. With the help of pivot tables, data filtering and web analytics dashboards, you can quickly gain valuable insights from your data without needing to be an expert.
Yes! Excel Dashboards can be integrated with a variety of other software and applications, such as Power BI and Tableau. This enables you to create interactive and visually appealing dashboards that can be easily shared with team members and other stakeholders.
The 3 layers of Excel Dashboards are the data layer, dashboard layer, and visual layer. The data layer contains raw data while the dashboard layer is where you create the dashboard layout. The visual layer consists of charts, graphs and other visuals that will be used to display the data in a meaningful way.
