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Developing Excel dashboards require the use of the more advanced features that excel provides such as VBA and pivottables. They are different from traditional excel reports. Excel is a cost effective solution in the development of executive and operational dashboards.

Most organisations will have aims and objectives or a balanced scorecard with their performance indicators. Developing an excel dashboard creates an opportunity for managers to have all their most important success factors that are relevant to be shown on an executive dashboard. You can also have more detailed operational dashboards that focus on a certain aspect of performance.

A single page

Don’t clutter your excel dashboard with unnecessary visual elements and data. If it looks too busy, then it will fail to communicate the data effectively. We are trying to communicate a message about the data. Don’t include every bit of data in a dashboard. The information should show progress towards key objectives and priorities. The other point here is that if something is out with your line of sight, then it can’t be viewed quickly or possibly missed altogether. When you print your dashboard, it should also fit to a single page.

Simple to understand

An excel dashboard should help to visually identify trends and patterns quickly without confusion. This means that there should not be any visual competition or chart junk present. Fancy formatting distracts users from the key messages. This includes fancy 3D charts, logos, pictures and gauges, which don’t communicate key messages well and take up too much space. Visual reports should help managers decide if any further action or drilling down is required. The use of visual attributes should be used to aid visual perception.

Add interactivity

Bright colours such as red will attract more attention than subtle colours, so keep bold colours to a minimum and only use them to highlight or as an alert. Some people are colour blind, which is another reason for using subtle colours. Use natural white space between components. Everything that is not communicating a message such as chart lines or grid line should be toned down or removed completely if appropriate. Keep black for data that needs to be more prominent. There are many other visual attributes, other than colour. For example, using a different SHAPE and size can make data stand out. So can the use of added marks such and other symbols. Enclosure can also be useful for drawing attention.

New VBA interactive excel dashboard, comes with fully working examples to help get you started. Great guides and courses on how to go about learning excel and other advanced techniques.