Excel 2019 Bible

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C H A P T E R

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Implementing Excel

Dashboarding Best Practices

IN THIS CHAPTER

Preparing for a dashboard project

Dashboard modeling best practices

Dashboard design best practices

A

dashboard is a visual interface that provides at-a-glance views into key measures

relevant to a particular objective or business process. Dashboards have three main

attributes:

■ Dashboards are typically graphical in nature, providing visualizations that help focus

attention on key trends, comparisons, and exceptions.

■ Dashboards often display data that is relevant only to the goal of the dashboard.

■ (^) Because dashboards are designed with a specific purpose or goal, they inherently contain
predefined conclusions that relieve end users from performing their own analysis.
Maybe you’ve been hit with dashboard fever. Or, your manager might be hounding you with dash-
board fever. Whatever the case, if you’re being asked to create dashboard solutions in Excel, it’s
tempting to start pulling a few charts together to create the dashboards you need.
Before you go into the world ready to use the charting techniques you’ve gathered here, however,
it’s valuable to understand some of the best practices for designing and creating dashboards.
This chapter is not about the mechanics of Excel. It is a look at some of the best practices and
design principles to keep in mind as you develop your own reporting solutions.
Preparing for a Dashboard Project
Imagine that your manager asks you to create a dashboard that provides everything there is to
know about monthly service subscriptions. Do you jump to action and slap together whatever comes
to mind? Do you take a guess at what your manager wants to see and hope that it’s useful? These
questions sound ridiculous, but such situations happen more than you think.
Excel® 2019 Bible, First Edition. Michael Alexander, Dick Kusleika and John Walkenbach.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.