Excel Dashboarding: Mastering Data Visualization and Advanced Analytics

Introduction

Excel dashboarding is the process of creating interactive visualizations of data and summarizing key performance indicators (KPIs) on a single dashboard. Excel is a powerful tool for data manipulation and analysis, making it an ideal choice for powerful dashboards. Excel dashboarding solutions offer a wide range of features and benefits, from advanced analytics to tracking progress over time.

Definition of Excel Dashboarding

Excel dashboarding is the process of taking large datasets and creating interactive visualizations. By using charts, tables, and other graphics, Excel dashboarding can make it easier to identify trends, measure performance, and present data in a more comprehensible format. It enables you to transform raw data into actionable insights that can be used to enhance operational decision-making.

Overview of the Benefits of Using Excel Dashboarding Solutions

• Ability to customize and tailor dashboards to specific organizational needs.
• Ability to drill down into data to identify and troubleshoot discrepancies.
• Easily identify trends or patterns in complex datasets.
• Integrate data from multiple sources for a more comprehensive view of KPIs.
• Create beautiful, shareable reports quickly and easily.
• Customizable and interactive visuals.

Data Gathering

Excel dashboarding solutions can help businesses collect data, analyze it, and present actionable insights to stakeholders. It is important to establish the proper steps to gather data, ensure its integrity, and source from trusted sources when performing advanced analytics.

Data sources

Organizations should consider multiple sources when gathering data for advanced analytics. For example a business may use primary (internal) data, such as customer logins, or secondary (external) data, such as industry reports. After deciding on suitable data sources, the business will need to ensure that the data is accurately collected.

Data integrity

Data integrity is essential to assure accuracy when performing advanced analytics. Organizations should take steps to make sure that data that has been collected is valid, accurate and complete. This includes conducting data integrity checks periodically, validating data formats, and flagging any discrepancies.

Trusted data sources

Another key step when gathering data for advanced analytics is to ensure it is coming from a trusted source. Organizations should evaluate their data sources to make sure they are reliable, trusted, and secure. To achieve this, the business should look for a source that provides timely, accurate, and encrypted data.

Extracting data from multiple sources, verifying its accuracy and assessing its reliability can be a time-consuming process. Excel dashboarding solutions can make the process of gathering data for advanced analytics easier. These solutions provide businesses with the proper tools to collect data from varied sources, ensure its integrity, and source from trustworthy sources in a timely manner.

Data Cleansing

Data cleansing is an essential step for successful advanced analytics using Excel dashboarding solutions. Cleaning the data sets is a must for accurate analytics, and it starts with identifying the most useful data points. Through data cleansing, users can determine the exact data points that are necessary to tell the story of their data, allowing them to focus their analytics efforts on the most relevant insights.

Identifying the most Useful Data Points

When it comes to advanced analytics, it is crucial to have the right data points available. Identifying the most useful data points can help reduce complexity, increase accuracy, and ensure that no vital insights are overlooked. Excel dashboarding solutions provide the tools necessary to perform an effective data cleansing and filter irrelevant data points that could affect the accuracy of analytics outcomes.

Cleaning the Data Sets

Once the useful data points have been identified, they must be properly cleansed in order to ensure accurate analytics results. Excel dashboarding solutions provide powerful features that allow users to clean the data sets in several ways. Some of these features include data deduplication, data splitting, data formatting, data normalization, and data transformation. Through data cleansing, users can ensure that their data sets are free of error and more insightful.

Users of Excel dashboarding solutions have access to powerful features to aid in data cleansing. By properly identifying and cleansing the data sets, users can ensure that their analytics results are accurate, leading to the discovery of deeper insights down the road.

Connecting Data Sets

Businesses often need to make decisions based on data from multiple sources. Unifying this data into a single model allows them to gain valuable insights. Excel dashboarding solutions are well-positioned to connect multiple data sets and build a more comprehensive picture of the data.

Combining Multiple Data Sources

Excel dashboarding solutions offer great flexibility in how they can extract and analyze data. They facilitate connections to a large number of external data sources – including files, databases, and APIs. It’s even possible to combine several data sources into a single model.

Excel dashboards can be customized to fit the unique requirements of each individual business. The resulting models can be used to filter and aggregate data, enabling decisions to be made based on a detailed and accurate picture.

Creating a Data Model in Excel

To build a data model in Excel, it’s important to first consider what type of chart or graph best fits the data. This will help make sure that the dashboard is easy to read and interpret. It’s also important to consider what type of queries are needed from the data. These queries will determine the structure and complexity of the model.

Once the model is built, Excel dashboards can be quickly populated with data. The data can be represented in a variety of ways, from bar charts to pie charts and line graphs. Excel also allows for granular customization of the dashboard, enabling users to customize the display for a tailored look and feel.

Data Visualization

Data visualization is a powerful tool for businesses to help them gain insights from their data. It can be used to better understand trends, compare data points, and more. With Excel dashboarding solutions, businesses can utilize a variety of powerful data visualization methods to quickly realize the potential of their data.

Various forms of data visualization

There are many forms of data visualization available to businesses who want to enhance their analytics capabilities with Excel dashboarding solutions. From charts and graphs to maps, scatterplots and more, there is an extensive selection of visuals that are suitable for presenting data in an easy-to-understand way. Through data visualization, businesses can get an efficient overview of their data and gain deeper insights into how to best use it.

Customizing visuals in Excel

Excel dashboarding solutions allow for full customization of visuals, making it easy for businesses to tailor their data presentation to meet their exact needs. Through a few simple clicks and steps, businesses can customize the colors, fonts, labels, and other elements of their data visuals to make them better aligned with business goals. With this level of customization, businesses have greater control over their data visualization and more accurate insights into their data.

• Charts and graphs
• Maps
• Scatterplots
• Colors
• Fonts
• Labels

Advanced Analytics

The use of advanced analytics in Excel dashboarding solutions can make businesses more agile and efficient. Advanced analytics are techniques and strategies used to monitor, measure and interpret data in a variety of ways. There are three main types of advanced analytics that are used in combination to work together and provide a comprehensive view of the data.

Predictive analytics

Predictive analytics within Excel dashboarding solutions uses existing data to forecast outcomes and spot trends in the data. It finds patterns in data and allows businesses to evaluate factors that can influence different events. This type of analytics helps to forecast future scenarios and make risk-based decisions.

Descriptive analytics

Descriptive analytics provide a detailed overview of the data in order to better understand what is happening in the dashboard. This type of analytic processes existing data to identify the relationships between metrics, correlations, links and trends in the data. This can be used to examine the implications of different patterns in the data and identify any opportunities or risks present within the dashboard.

Prescriptive analytics

Prescriptive analytics provide actionable insights and predictions that allow businesses to take proactive responses to new trends or potential issues identified in the data. This type of analytics combines predictive and descriptive techniques to provide recommendations on how to improve processes, identify opportunities and take the best possible decisions in the future.

Using these three types of advanced analytics within Excel dashboarding solutions helps businesses to make more readily informed decisions and respond quickly to changing trends and issues. This can increase efficiency, improve performance and allow businesses to better capitalize on opportunities as they arise.

Conclusion

Excel dashboarding provides business professionals with potent tools for data analysis and visualization. By utilizing Excel’s advanced analytics capabilities, such as PivotTables, PivotCharts, and data sets, businesses can develop sophisticated and insightful dashboards that are easy to utilize across their organization. This capability enables more informed decision-making and the ability to better track and trend their organizational goals.

Recap of the advantages of utilizing Excel for dashboarding

Excel dashboards offer a variety of advantages, including speedy and comprehensive insight into data, improved decision-making capacity, improved communication and collaboration among teams, and the ability to track goals with ease. Additionally, Excel dashboards allow users to create resizable graphs and charts, manipulate data, and share dashboards effectively.

Summary of how to achieve advanced analytics with Excel dashboards

To achieve advanced analytics with Excel dashboards, users should begin by optimizing the data for analyze, using PivotTables, PivotCharts and other data manipulation tools. Once the data is optimized, users can then begin to visualize the data using various chart types and tables. Finally, users should use the “What-If Analysis” feature in Excel to have the dashboard provide in-depth insights into the overall data. With these three key steps, users can easily utilize Excel to develop advanced analytics dashboards.