Chandoo and Robert over at the PHD blog have a nice a 4 post series of posts about Creating KPI Dashboards in Microsoft Excel.
- Show only 10 items of a huge list, but give the user the chance to scroll down without having to go to the list of raw data.
- Let the user choose how the list is sorted (Adding One Click Sort)
- Add further value by brushing the data
- Improve visualization by adding meaningful bar charts directly into the table
I really recommend you to read Robert’s articles. Having scrolling in your sorted table is just a really smart addition to your Excel dashboard.
Yesterdays post was about Adding One Click Sort:
I knew that Robert would show how to add bar charts in a later article, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to pick up Robert’s workbook and to add some Micro Bar Charts.
I opened Roberts workbook, added some columns for my bars, and inserted a Micro Bar Chart:
The I defined colors for the positive and negative bars:
And defined the appropriate number format string of our KPI thick mark labels:
And you are done !
