Excel Template for Dashboards

An easy solution for business intelligence dashboard reporting is sitting right under our noses! Consider implementing dashboard reporting in Excel.

Everyone has Microsoft Excel, so why don't more people use it for creating dashboard reports? Well, the consensus among the dashboard designers I spoke to seems to be that one can't get dashboard designs out of Excel that don't look like, well, dashboards made in Excel.

Yes, we've all seen those dashboards that are simply a collection of Excel graphs. Well, take a look at this nice dashboard layout:



Yes, that slick looking layout is done in 100% Excel. It's a dashboard Excel Template that is all set up and ready to point at your data. Use that link to check out the details.

Even Stephen Few likes the dashboard. See his blog entry in Visual Business Intelligence titled When Expensive Dashboard Software Doesn't Work, Do It with Excel.

Go Excel for dashboards!

Business Benefits of Digital Dashboards

If you are trying to justify a business intelligence dashboard project in your enterprise, here are some charts that you may find helpful. Whether you are calculating Return on Investment (ROI) or building a business case more anecdotally, there are both business benefits and technical benefits.

Here are some business benefits of using enterprise dashboards:

• Improved Decision Making


• Faster Time-to-Market


• Improved Competitive Advantage


• Improved Customer Satisfaction


• Better Productivity


• More Profits

And here are some significant technical advantages of business dashboards:

• Rapid Problem Detection


• Faster Response to KPI Changes


• Reduction of Work


• Improved Organizational Alignment


• Identification of Problems


• Management of Exceptions


• Better Visibility into Remote Operations


• Increased Operational Efficiencies

Here are the charts. Please click on the graphics to enlarge them:






Tags: Digital Dashboard Business Benefits

Flex Dashboard Example

Here's an example of a RIA dashboard using Flex technologies. It's an interactive flex demo so check it out at the link.

The demo was done as part of the Degrafa project (Declarative Graphics Framework for Flex) and you can read about it on this post about the Degrafa Dashboard Concept Example.



Tags: Degrafa Dashboards, Flex, RIA Dashboard

Personal Health Metrics Dashboard

Digital dashboards are perfect for tracking Key Performance Indicators and metrics throughout the corporate world, but how about using them to track personal metrics as well? Here is a screenshot of a personal health metrics dashboard used to track weight management regimines.

Equipment Sales Dashboard Metrics

Here is a look at an equipment sales dashboard that tracks key performance indicators and metrics for a UK-based exercise equipment dealer. Note that the focus is clearly on tracking the various financial metrics such as gross margin, sales quantity, sales value, cost of goods, and various slices by factors such as sales channel, region, product group and payment type.

News Dashboards for Tracking Sports Events

The growing popularity of digital dashboards indicates that the dashboard design pattern's efficacy extends beyond that of traditional business intelligence. We are seeing it used more and more as navigation elements and information presentation layouts.

Here are a couple of news type dashboards. Specifically, these were used to track the March Madness that occurs during the NCAA tournament.

Management Dashboard with Sparklines

If the idea of a BI dashboard or scorecard is to present business intelligence in as concise a manner as possible, then one absolutely must look to charts and graphs that are information-rich yet efficient in terms of screen real estate. Sparklines and bullet charts come to mind.

Take a look at the charting options made possible by Microcharts, a charting solution for Excel used by many business dashboard implementation teams.

Here's a good example of a management dashboard with sparklines and bullet charts.



Here are some sample charts:



There is an online demo of this Excel management dashboard.