5 Best Practices for Creating Effective Excel Dashboards

Introduction

Excel dashboards provide powerful visual tools to interpret large amounts of data. Dashboards act as a summary of your data, which help to easily identify trends and relationships for insight into the current performance of your business. To build effective Excel dashboards, it is important to understand best practices.

The five best practices for creating effective Excel dashboards are as follows:

• Design for clarity
• Integrate relevant data
• Simplify
• Perform regular check-ins
• Make adjustments as needed

By following these simple best practices, you will be able to create Excel dashboards that will enable you to accurately interpret your data and take informed action.

Selecting an Appropriate Chart Type

Selecting the appropriate chart type for your Excel dashboard is incredibly important. The chart type should be selected based on the story that needs to be told, as well as the data available. The following are some best practices to consider when selecting the right chart type to effectively communicate insights.

Understand the Story You Need to Tell

First and foremost, it’s important to take a step back and understand the story you want your Excel dashboard to tell. How is the data related? What trends or patterns should the audience be aware of? By first zeroing in on the story, selecting a chart type becomes much more straightforward.

Review Appropriate Chart Types Based on Your Data

After understanding the story you need to tell, review which chart types will be most effective in helping you communicate your insights. When analyzing data, consider using the following chart types, depending on the type of data:

• Bar graphs for nominal and ordinal data.
• Pie charts for relative comparisons and proportions.
• Line graphs for time-series data.
• Scatter plots to measure correlation between two variables.
• Histograms to analyze frequency.
• Cumulative charts to track running totals.

To further enhance the visual impact of your Excel dashboard, consider styling and coloring elements in a way that closely aligns with the story you are trying to tell. Doing so helps to increase user engagement and understanding of insights within the dashboard.

Organizing Your Data

When it comes to creating an effective and visually appealing Excel dashboard, organizing your data correctly is key. By taking care to structure and categorize your data, you can ensure that your dashboard is easy to read and provides clear insights.

Break Data into Logical Sections

Before you begin organizing your data in Excel, it is important to break it down into logical sections. Define categories and subcategories that reflect the topics covered in your dataset. Doing so will help you better understand the relationships between your data points and make it easier to organize the data into visually compelling sections.

Use a Consistent Color Scheme

Using a consistent color scheme is crucial when it comes to creating effective Excel dashboards. A color scheme helps to distinguish one section of your data from another, making it easier for readers to quickly interpret the data. When selecting colors, choose hues that are visually distinct from one another, yet still complementary.

Use Table Styles

Table styles allow you to quickly format your spreadsheet data, making it easier to distinguish one section from another. When designing your Excel dashboard, use a single style for each section of your data and refrain from adding too many colors or decorative elements. This will help to ensure that the focus remains on the data, rather than the design.

Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting allows you to quickly visualize patterns and trends in your data. For example, you can create rules that will highlight cells that are above or below a certain value, or cells that contain specific words or phrases. This helps to quickly identify outliers or values that may need further analysis.

Making Your Data Visual with Dashboards

Creating visually appealing and easy-to-read dashboards is an effective way to convey complex data sets quickly and accurately to viewers. Utilizing best practices when creating and interpreting dashboards can help ensure that critical information is presented in the most efficient and effective way. Here are some of the best practices for creating effective Excel dashboards.

Utilize What-If Analysis

What-if analysis is a powerful tool in Excel that can be used to understand how changes in one input value may affect other factors in the data set. This critical tool allows users to quickly and efficiently review various scenarios and can produce deeper insights and understanding. For example, a what-if analysis on a dashboard tracking sales figures can help the user identify target markets, optimization, and cost savings.

Add Connections Between Dashboards

Connecting Excel dashboards can be a powerful way to gain insights into increasingly complex data sets. By connecting various dashboards, users can gain a comprehensive picture of how different data points or inputs can affect each other, creating a detailed multi-dimensional image of the data set. For example, connecting a marketing dashboard to a financial dashboard can provide valuable insights into potential sales figures for a particular market.

Make Raw Data and Calculations Readily Available

In order for users to accurately interpret the insights from their dashboards, having raw data and calculations readily available is essential. If a viewer wants to take a deeper dive into the data set, having the raw data and the equations used for calculations easily accessible can provide an opportunity to get an informed and comprehensive understanding of the numbers displayed on the dashboard. In addition, having the raw data available allows the user to view and edit individual cells as needed.

5. Maintain Performance

Creating Excel dashboards that are effective and efficient requires careful attention to resource-heavy calculations, good file structure, and the use of Power Query and Power Pivot. Here are five best practices for maintaining performance of your dashboards.

a. Minimize Resource Heavy Calculations

Resource-heavy calculations can quickly slow down or freeze your dashboards. Use static visual elements such as excel charts and pivot tables instead of formulas. You can also reduce formulas by using cell references, Named Ranges and using the Excel macro recorder to automate repetitive tasks.

b. Make Use of Good File Structure

Organizing your Excel file in the right way can help with performance. An organized structure makes it easier to find the required information and minimize the risk of accidental corruption. Make sure to group any related worksheets together, name worksheets, use tabs to navigate between sheets, and create a summary worksheet.

c. Utilize Power Query and Power Pivot

Power Query and Power Pivot provide the tools to organize and manipulate large amounts of data. Power Query allows you to quickly create relationships between tables. Power Pivot enables you to manage long lists of data which can be efficiently pulled into your dashboard. It also enables you to store large amounts of data as well as display data on dashboards in meaningful ways.

Enhance Your Dashboards with Macros

In Excel, macros are pieces of code used to automate a task. This automation saves you time and eliminates tedious manual entries. Enhance your dashboards with macros to make them even more dynamic.

Automating Desired Results with Macros

In order to get the most out of macros, it’s important to first understand the task you want to automate. What are you trying to achieve with your dashboard? Once you know the desired results, you can start writing the code.

Macros are useful for automating logical tests. A logical test can mean comparing the value of two cells, checking if a row has a value, or making adjustments based on a range of values. When Excel compares the source material to your logical test criteria, it can apply a new set of criteria as defined by the macro.

Say you need to display areas of improvement whenever a number falls beneath a specific benchmark. Writing a macro is an effective way to do this. The macro would look for anything under the pre-set benchmark, and would automatically change the cells to display the desired results.

Understanding Your Needs Before Writing a Macro

Before writing a macro, it’s important to understand the underlying purpose of the macro and how it will integrate with the rest of your dashboard. You should note down the variables, any calculations that need to be done, and data you’ll be pulling from external sources.

Writing a macro requires access to the Visual Basic integrated development environment (IDE). There are multiple libraries of free macros other users have posted online, but if you’re creating one from scratch, you’ll need to understand Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and the syntax for programming in it.

Some useful websites to look at to get started with macro writing include MSDN and StackOverflow, as well as other tutorials provided online. Writing effective macros can take practice, but soon enough, you’ll understand how all the parts of the code fit together.

Conclusion

Creating effective and easy-to-understand Excel Dashboards is a great way to communicate complex data in a concise way. To make the process effective, it is important to adhere to some key principles and best practices. In this blog post, we explored five of the best practices to use when creating effective Excel Dashboards.

Summary of Best Practices

These practices include ensuring that the layout of the dashboard is well-organized, relevant and visually appealing, utilizing data filtering and dynamic updates to ensure scalability and relevance, leveraging automation and macros to reduce time spent on manual updating and reduce potential for errors, using mockup designs to ensure the dashboards look good and check for accuracy and alignment before publishing, and making sure the dashboard remains interactive for users.

Wrap Up and Tips for Further Development

These best practices are the essential elements to create a great Excel Dashboard. As you create your dashboard, make sure to keep each of these points in mind and refer back to this post if needed. Additionally, there are more specific tips and tricks that can be applied to make the dashboard more engaging. To further develop ideas, research on dashboards that other successful businesses have developed and see how they incorporate industry-specific data. With proper practice and knowledge, creating effective dashboard is achievable.