We did play around quite a bit with the layout, and one version had the total sparkline on the right also, but in practice it seemed to lose the framing effect which the bars give.

The main reason we went with this version though was down to the business, in that it’s the one they chose from 3 slightly varying alternatives we offered!

Andreas

Love this concept, but don’t wish to have to walk users through adding the add-in to their Excel environment or create a custom installer.

Please advise and thanks.

What I have been taught is the fact that - the same goes for database design - seven out of nine steps necessary are research, asking questions, verifying and validating if we have the same understanding etc.

I have applied a cube to one of my colleagues and before we together developed the necessary dimensions / asked ourselves what we wanted to see, I gave her a short introduction on what this tool was capable of. Showing her the functionality helped a lot when thinking about dimensions etc.

Maybe the approach to always have a simple example at hand would help other developers (although I’m not a developer ) with their next cube projects.

My dashboard for Unemployment in the U.S. is updated with January 2010 data. You can find it at http://bit.ly/ciPx0B.

I’ve added sparklines to show 12 months of time-series data to the demographic section of the dashboard. So now you can see trends by demographic segment. In addition, I’ve added microbar charts to the industry index section on the bottom right side of the dashboard so now you can see the size of the change in hours worked from the prior month. This is more informative than the colored circles I used previously which indicated large changes up or down without showing the size of the change.

Andreas