Excel Dashboard Templates

Learn how to create Excel dashboards.

Monday, July 30, 2007

Cholesterol and Triglyceride Monitoring Dashboard

One of the reasons that executive dashboards are the latest new thing is that they are so old. Is that a contradictory statement? No, the idea of an executive dashboard is comfortable because it seems so familiar to a range of users. Today, we all think of enterprise dashboards as web-based applications, but for years, the dashboard layout was a popular first view of a client-server or desktop application.

In that sense, many software architects used the application dashboard as a summary of key indicators, a jump-off point for navigation, and a way to make the look and feel compelling and useful. The dashboard as a UI design pattern has been sucessfully used for many years.

Today we look at a desktop application done in an executive dashboard style. This cholesterol and triglycerides monitoring dashboard allows the user to manage their cholesterol management regimen. The left side navigation includes doctor, exercise, diet, data, library, money and preference sections. Right side portlets include content such as to-do lists, email reminders, tasks, lab results and charts of the user's cholesterol and triglyceride levels.

Click on the screenshot of the monitoring dashboard to enlarge your view:



In terms of the design, it is functional, but I think there is a slight problem with the left side navigation. I am assuming that the onstate left nav bar is the doctor tab (as evidenced by the appearance of the sub-level navigation panel in blue). However, shouldn't the left navigation drive the right-side content? If so, the right side should show doctor-related content? Maybe it does, or maybe the first left side navigation item should be "My Dashboard".

Tags: Monitoring Dashboard, Executive Dashboard Design, Dashboard Example, Business Intelligence

Favorite links: Executive Dashboards by The Dashboard Spy

Friday, July 13, 2007

Websphere Dashboard for Insurance KPIs

This executive dashboard was produced with the IBM Websphere Portal Server and their Portlet Factory using the Websphere Dashboard Framework. Typical of executive dashboards, it provides a visually-based summary of key metrics and KPIs. It is a business dashboard, in this case, created especially for the insurance industry.

Click on this screenshot to enlarge the view of this executive dashboard.


Executive Dashboard Screenshot of Insurance Metrics

The Insurance KPI dashboard shows the overview tab which summarizes performance metrics such as Premiums Revenue Tracking, Number of New Policies Written, Average Policy Size, Underwriting Analysis and Underwriting Speed.

IBM does not support this particular dashboard as a product, but does offer the code for download to the dashboard development community as a jump start to an insurance industry dashboard. If you are developing dashboards with IBM Websphere Portal Server, check out the code download page for the IBM Dashboard KPI for Insurance.

Tags: Websphere Dashboard, Websphere Portal Dashboards, Insurance Dashboards, Executive Dashboards

Thursday, July 5, 2007

Creating Traffic Light Indicators in Xcelsius Using the Bubble Chart Component

Those of us using Crystal Xcelsius for executive dashboards often wish there was an out-of-the-box component for traffic light-style performance indicators. Red/Green/Yellow indicator lights are universally understood as indicators of state and are universally found on practically all executive dashboards. In fact, most business executives actually think in terms of green/red, good/bad modalities.

The author of my favorite book on Crystal Xcelsius ( Crystal Xcelsius For Dummies ) has an article where he shows step by step instructions on how to produce these neat executive dashboard traffic lights (click on the images to enlarge if necessary):




The basic idea is to use the built-in bubble chart component and strip everything out except for the bubble. Here is the usual bubble chart:

This link to the Xcelsius traffic light tutorial is definitely worth visiting. The author carefully illustrates each step that he takes, including the construction of the underlying excel spreadsheet and how to tie the series into Xcelsius.
Tags: Xcelsius Dashboard Indicators, Executive Dashboards