Create an Engaging Excel Dashboard & Visualization

Introduction

Dashboards and visualizations are an essential part of monitoring any project. Excel dashboards and visualizations are simply a way to present data in a visual, easy to understand format. Through the use of charts and graphs, they transform complex data sets into simple, visual stories that make it easier for the user to understand the data.

Definition of an Excel Dashboard & Visualization

An Excel dashboard is an organized collection of data displays that provide quick, at-a-glance information and insights. Excel visualizations are the graphical representations of data, such as graphs, maps, and charts. These visualizations make it easier to quickly comprehend and analyze data.

Benefits of Excel Dashboards & Visualizations

Excel dashboards and visualizations offer several advantages. They can help you make better and more informed decisions, spot trends and anomalies, and identify opportunities. By utilizing Excel dashboards and visualizations, you can easily save time and efforts, track performance, and gain new insights.

Using Excel dashboards and visualizations you can:
- Easily monitor performance and track data without having to calculate it manually.
- Quickly identify trends and anomalies.
- Make better and more informed decisions.
- Gain new insights from data.

Creating a Visualization

Creating a dashboard visualization is a great way to organize and analyze data quickly. The process can be broken down into four key steps. Understanding the given data first and foremost, deciding on the style of visualization, choosing the appropriate metadata that is needed to create it, and finally utilizing the data filtering and sorting function in Excel.

a. Understand Your Data

It is important to gain a full understanding of the data that is available, in order to decide on a suitable visualization. It is important to create a specific goal for the dashboard, as this will help to select a visualization that is most fitting for the data. It is also important to take note of any measure types, and consider what functions need to be used to aggregate the data.

b. Decide Style of Visualization

The chosen style of visualization should display the data in the most efficient way possible. The style should also help to support the goal of the dashboard. Common visualization styles include bar and column graphs, as well as pie charts, line graphs and scatter plots. Depending on the type of data, text tables and maps may be used too.

c. Choose Appropriate Metadata

Metadata is what is used to create the visualizations in Excel. It consists of columns and rows that should accurately describe the data, such as labels and captions, colours, size and alignment of the text, and other settings to customize the look of the visual. Metadata should be carefully chosen and accurately reflected in the visualization.

d. Use Excel Data Filtering & Sorting

Once the metadata has been decided on, data filtering and sorting can be used to further organize the data in a way that best highlights the analysis target. This feature can be used to separate and group data for more efficient analysis, and it enables users to focus on subsets of data that are relevant to the specific visualization.

Understand Your Data
Decide Style of Visualization
Choose Appropriate Metadata
Use Excel Data Filtering & Sorting

Formatting Visualizations

Being able to effectively design and format visualizations in an Excel Dashboard can be the difference between telling an effective story with data versus presenting a confusing array of data points. Luckily, there are some strategies for ensuring that your visualizations have the best possible design.

Use a Consistent Color Palette

Using a consistent color palette across your dashboard helps ensure that readers are able to quickly make sense of your visuals. If you are displaying a series of line or bar graphs, using a consistent color palette across the visual will prevent readers from being overwhelmed and confused. Additionally, using colors that closely align with brand colors or colors utilizing a global standard like the web colors will help ensure consistency across dashboards.

Use Standard Fonts

Choosing standard fonts to use across your dashboard is important for ensuring that the dashboard looks consistent and reads easily. Popular standard fonts like Arial, Times New Roman and Helvetica are widely available, while Google Fonts offer a wider variety of options depending on the look and feel you are trying to achieve with your dashboard.

Use Charts & Graphs of the Same Size

When using various types of charts and graphs in an Excel dashboard, ensure that all of the visuals are the same size. This will make it easier for readers to compare visualizations and draw correlations between data points. It will also ensure that each chart and graph gets the same level of attention from the reader and is not overshadowed by larger visuals.

Adding Functionality

When designing an Excel dashboard, it is essential to provide users with the capability to interact with the data in customized ways. Doing so allows users to quickly respond to changing business needs and capitalize on opportunities. Utilizing filters and sorting, along with incorporating zoom buttons, is a great way to offer users flexible data manipulation options. Additionally, leveraging pivot tables can add even more control.

Utilize Filtering & Sorting

Adding filters and sorting is an effective way to ensure end users can interact with data quickly and effectively. Excel allows users to apply filters to charted data, as well as pivot tables, ensuring users can drill down to granular levels of specific analyses. With the click of a button, dashboards can be tailored to display only relevant subsets of data and present a complete view with a variety of data manipulation options.

Incorporate Zoom Buttons

Zoom buttons offer control to the user and allow them to focus on specific rows and columns without having to alter other settings. When leveraging zoom buttons, users can choose to focus in on the information they need without having to be overwhelmed by additional irrelevant data. Excel allows users to design detailed and flexible zoom buttons to ensure smooth operation when navigating dashboards.

Use Pivot Tables

Pivot tables can help users quickly arrange, manipulate, and organize large amounts of data from different sources. With pivot tables, users can access information from a wide array of locations and compile it into a single set for further analysis. Excel also provides a variety of styling options for pivot tables, making them visually appealing, as well as interactive and informative.

Incorporate filters
utilize sorting
employ zoom buttons
leverage pivot table

Utilizing Slicers

Slicers are a powerful interactive feature available in the latest versions of Microsoft Excel which allow users to quickly filter and view related data within their workloads. Slicers are easy to set up and use, making them a great way to increase user engagement with data and create highly interactive data presentations. Let’s look at the benefits of using slicers and how you can add them to your Excel dashboards.

Benefit of using slicers

Using slicers can be a great way to reduce the amount of time spent manually filtering and editing data in your Excel files. Instead, users can simply click different 'slices' within their data to quickly toggle which values are included and excluded. This not only dramatically increases user engagement with their data presentation, but also reduces the amount of time needed to explore and interact with their data.

How to add slicers

Adding slicers is a quick and easy process. To add a slicer, simply select the column or range of data that you wish to filter, then select “Insert” from the ribbon and choose “Slicer.” This will open a new dialogue box where you can select which columns you wish to filter. Once you have selected the desired columns, click “OK” and your slicer will be added to the Excel document.

Once a slicer is added, you can customise its look and feel by selecting “Options” from the context menu and changing the font, background colour and text size. You can also assign keyboard shortcuts to make it even easier to use, or save your slicer as a template to easily reuse it in other worksheets.

Streamlining Visualizations with Conditional Formatting

Financial dashboards have become a staple in businesses today, and Excel is often the go-to tool. Excel dashboards can be effective in visualizing data, but with the proper tools and strategies it's possible to better streamline those visuals for maximum impact.

The use of conditional formatting is one way of doing this. Conditional formatting is settings that determine how data and information is presented in a given dashboard. This can help to more quickly highlight important data points and better organize information.

What is Conditional Formatting?

Essentially, conditional formatting is a set of rules that determines how a spreadsheet or other data displays. These rules can include criteria such as color coding information, restructuring data, or highlighting specific items. Conditional formatting can be applied in a number of ways, such as giving data a particular color if it matches certain criteria, or applying a certain style to cells where the value exceeds a certain limit.

How to Apply it to Dashboards

Using conditional formatting effectively can be key to creating an effective dashboard. Here are some tips to consider:

Understand the goal of the dashboard. Knowing the purpose of the dashboard can help identify which data sets are important and how to better present them using conditional rules.
Start by formatting the basics. Consider formatting elements such as the background color, font type and sizes, and alignment. This will help to structure the dashboard for when the more advanced formatting is applied.
Incorporate visuals. Use conditional formatting to apply various chart and chart types to the data to better display the insights.
Choose the right colors. Color can be a powerful tool in visualizing data. Use colors to better emphasize the most important data points or the trends.
Create multiple profiles. Remember that data can be interpreted in multiple ways. Create different profiles with different rules to give users the flexibility to toggle between different views.

Using conditional formatting to create a streamlined dashboard can be an effective way to maximize the potential of how data is presented. It's an important tool in improving the impact of visualizations in Excel dashboard.

Conclusion

Excel dashboards and visualizations provide an effective way of communicating complex data. In this article, we’ve had a comprehensive look at some strategies for designing Excel dashboards and visualizations for the most effective outcomes. We discussed different types of Excel visualizations, improvements to existing visualizations, ways to create engaging visuals using charts and diagrams, and the importance of displaying data in the most meaningful way.

By keeping these strategies in mind while designing an Excel dashboard, you’ll be able to create an effective, visually striking projection of your data. The best dashboard design should focus on readability, accuracy and clarity, as well as being easy to change as the data it represents changes.

Once you’ve designed your dashboard and visualizations, the next steps include quality testing the dashboard, ensuring that data is accurate and up-to-date, and verifying its accuracy.