Essential Tips for Creating Robust & Easy to Use Excel Dashboards

Introduction

Excel dashboards are powerful, data-driven documents used to track and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and other important information. They enable individuals and organizations to easily visualize complex data, track trends, and make informed decisions.

Using dashboards can help streamline communication, improve the efficiency of daily operations, and provide employees with actionable insights. Whether you are an Excel beginner or a seasoned pro, understanding how to create robust and easy to use Excel dashboards is an essential skill that everyone should have.

Overview of Benefits

• Enhanced data visualization
• Easier data analysis
• More accurate decision-making
• Improved collaboration among stakeholders
• Better visibility into operations
• Efficient communication among teams

Keep Design Flexible & Easy to Understand

Excel-based dashboards have become popular for good reason. They provide a powerful and easy to comprehend way to manage data, make few assumptions about the user’s technical experience and are flexible enough to be customized based on the user’s data needs. With the right design, Excel dashboards can be extremely effective tools for businesses seeking to analyze their data and make informed decisions. To ensure your Excel dashboard is robust, flexible and easy to understand, here are some tips for creating effective dashboards.

Avoid Clutter & Complications

When it comes to dashboard design, less is often more. Excessive graphical elements, tables, and charts can clutter the page and leave the user feeling overwhelmed. Additionally, complicated formulas and complex data can be difficult to follow and distracts the user from the bigger picture. Ideally, you want to design your dashboard so that the most essential facts and figures are clearly communicated in the fewest possible steps.

Choose Appropriate Charts

Charts and tables provide a clear and simple way to display data in the dashboard. When selecting charts for your dashboard, it’s important to choose ones that are most appropriate for the information you are attempting to convey. For example, pie charts are great for showing breakdowns, while line graphs are better for displaying trends over time. Additionally, be sure to use consistent chart styling throughout the dashboard. This will create an overall cohesive look, making it easier for the user to identify important data.

• Choose charts that are appropriate for the data you are trying to convey
• Use consistent chart styling throughout the dashboard
• Keep the design of the dashboard uncluttered and uncomplicated
• Avoid excess graphs, tables, and formulas

Construct User-Friendly Data Sets

When building Excel dashboards it is essential to ensure that data sets are user-friendly. This includes not only accurate and up-to-date data, but data that is presented in a clear and cohesive format. When constructing user-friendly data sets, two key components should be given consideration: ensuring data cohesion and clarity, and automating routine calculations.

Ensure Data Cohesion & Clarity

Data cohesion and clarity are integral to creating a user-friendly dashboard. This involves producing data sets that include all relevant data points, presented in a format that is easy to understand and use. Data should be arranged in consistent columns and rows and relevant titles should be clearly indicated.

Eliminating unnecessary information is also important. Unused cells, columns or rows should be deleted or hidden. This will help to make the dashboard easier to navigate and maintain, while also simplifying presenting data and enabling quicker calculations.

Automate Routine Calculations

When creating an Excel dashboard, calculations should be automated wherever possible. This means that users don’t have to manually perform calculations and can immediately interpret data. Such automation should also include ensuring that data is kept up-to-date, by linking calculations to source data.

For larger dashboards with multiple users, it is also important to ensure that users are locked from making changes to calculations, in order to prevent unexpected results. This helps users to interpret the data with confidence, without worrying about how the values of a specific table or cell have been derived.

Utilize Tools & Special Features

Microsoft Excel is an incredibly powerful and versatile tool for creating robust and easy-to-use dashboards. In addition to traditional spreadsheet skills, there are a number of ways to leverage tools and special features for creating an impactful, comprehensive dashboard.

Use Auto-Fill & Related Functions

Advanced auto fill functions are beneficial for streamlining data entry and reducing manual calculations and lookups. Excel’s automatic auto fill function can fill cells in a column or across the row with related information. For example, the “Fill Series” function can be used to quickly populate a series of dates, such as month and year, instead of manually inputting this data.

Leverage Charts, Pivot Tables & Macros

Charts and graphs are a visual way to communicate information for effective dashboards. Leveraging Excel's chart creation tools, including 2D and 3D options, make it easy to create visuals that enhance comprehension. Pivot tables can be used to generate powerful reports from large data sets quickly and efficiently.

Excel provides the ability to program VBA macros into your dashboard to speed up repetitive tasks. Writing macros can make data entry easier, reduce errors, and save time. Additionally, Excel offers a number of powerful built-in formulas that can be utilized for creating useful dashboards.

Analyze Effectively

Analyzing data effectively is essential in order to create robust and easy to use Excel dashboards. By analyzing data, users can pin-point and interpret trends, as well as monitor performance over time. Therefore, it's important that users are able to quickly and accurately identify correlations and discrepancies which can impact the decision-making process.

Pinpoint & Interpret Trends

By pinpointing and interpreting trends, users can gain better insights into their data and make better informed decisions. To do this, users should look for patterns in their data that indicate changes in performance over time. They should also look for outliers that might indicate unusual activity or an unexpected result. By spotting and interpreting trends, users can discover areas in need of attention and take the necessary corrective measures.

Monitor Performance over Time

Monitoring performance over time is essential for effectively analyzing data. This can include analyzing key metrics such as sales figures, customer satisfaction levels, or employee productivity. By studying the performance of these metrics over time, users can identify correlations and discrepancies which can provide valuable insights and inform decision-making. Additionally, users can also compare their performance metrics against industry standards in order to gauge where they stand.

In order to ensure accurate analysis, it's important for users to be aware of common pitfalls when analyzing data. These can include misinterpretation of data points, incorrect assumptions, or failing to consider long-term trends. By avoiding these pitfalls and understanding the implications of their analysis, users can ensure that their Excel dashboards are effective and easy to use.

Share & Collaborate

Making sure that teams are able to collaborate effectively on dashboards is essential to ensure that accurate and up-to-date information is spread throughout the organisation. The following steps can be taken to make sure that it is easy to achieve this.

Publish Interactive Dashboards

Publishing interactive dashboards allows multiple users to view the same metrics at the same time. The changes made to the dashboard by a user will be visible to other users in real-time. This provides an effective way for teams to collaborate on a project and spot problems with the data quickly.

Allow Multiple Users

Allowing multiple users to access the dashboard also allows teams to set up automated checks and alarms. This will ensure that any data anomalies are quickly spotted and the team can take steps to address the issue. It can also help teams to ensure that the data is up-to-date and accurate.

By investing both time and resources into setting up robust and easy-to-use Excel dashboards, teams can ensure that they are able to easily collaborate and share information quickly and accurately. In addition, it can help to reduce any potential errors by allowing teams to spot issues quickly and take corrective action.

Conclusion

Creating a robust and user-friendly Excel dashboard can be a challenging task. It requires a lot of planning and careful attention to detail. By following the essential tips outlined in this blog post, you can create an effective Excel dashboard that not only looks great but is also easy to use.

Some of the essential tips that were discussed in this blog post are: creating a well-structured dashboard layout, utilizing the right visualization tools such as charts, creating intuitive labels and meaningful tagging, applying a consistent them to the dashboard, testing the dashboard for usability and accessibility, and deploying automation so that the dashboard is up to date.

Excel dashboards can provide a wide range of benefits, including providing a comprehensive overview of data, enabling powerful data analysis, and helping to identify hidden trends and correlations. By following these tips, you can ensure that your Excel dashboard provides all of these benefits and more.