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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 !

 
Click here to download the KPI Dashboard Table with Bars (needs MicoCharts installed).