Author: Catherine France
//Interactive and responsive dashboard sheets have been a core feature of XLCubed for a number of years. Version 10.0.81 introduced dashboard titles (with additional improvements added in 10.0.98) as a further way to simplify the dashboarding process.
Continue reading “Dashboard Titles”
//Business data is often better understood when viewed in the context of another scenario. We need to know if we are doing better than this time last year, or how close we are to meeting our budget. Variance charts are effective at displaying these differences between actual and comparative values. They can show absolute or relative variances and be coloured to indicate either a good or bad impact on the business.
Continue reading “Scenario Comparisons With Variance Charts”
//Income statements, or Profit and Loss statements, are an essential part of any business. However, when displayed as a large table of numbers, it can be difficult to draw out the information needed to answer simple questions such as “how has my revenue changed compared to last year?” or “which region has the largest contribution to labour expenses?”.
Waterfall charts are a great solution for this. In our last blog, we discussed how to use waterfalls for time analysis. Today, we will demonstrate how to use waterfalls for profit and loss statements, with intuitive scenario and account formatting.
Continue reading “Waterfall Charts for Profit and Loss Statements”
//Waterfall charts are a great way of visualising contributions to a total or a total variance. They allow you to analyse how a value is influenced by the cumulative effect of underlying positive or negative inputs. This can lead to quicker and more effective business insights.
Waterfalls are available as a chart type with XLCubed, in either a column or bar orientation. They connect directly to your data source, are fully interactive, and are easily inserted into an Excel sheet.
Continue reading “Waterfall Charts in Excel – Time Analysis”
//Choosing the right chart type to display your data is key to communicating an understandable message to users. Bad or inconsistent use of chart types can lead to confusion and poor interpretations of the data. For a report to be effective, each visualisation must be carefully and deliberately chosen.
In this post, we will outline some of the guidance on chart orientation and type given by IBCS.
Continue reading “Lessons From IBCS – Choosing The Right Chart Type”
//Consider this simple grid. It shows a ranking of the top 10 products by Sales Amount. We are going to add our own headers to this grid allowing us to create our own column names as well as implement custom functionality for dynamic ranking.
Continue reading “Custom Grid & Table Headers For Dynamic Sorting”
//Do you ever find yourself creating the same grid over and over again? Sometimes we want to add the same grid multiple times but with a few variations, or in different workbooks. This can be especially tiresome if the grid has complex member selections or if the underlying data model has a large number of dimensions and hierarchies.
Fortunately, XLCubed provides a simple and quick way to insert saved grids…
//This is a revised version of this post: Warning: Excel can get Volatile
Excel is a great tool for dashboard/report delivery and design (it’s why we created our addin in the first place!), but there is a hidden performance trap:
Offset, Now, Today, Cell, Indirect, Info and Rand
If you’ve ever used any of these formulae, you may have noticed that whenever you change a cell, or collapse/expand a data grouping, Excel recalculates. That is because these are VOLATILE formulae, as soon as you use one of these, Excel will enter a mode where everything is always recalculating, and for good reason.
Continue reading “Warning: Excel Can Get Volatile (revised)”
//Proper data visualisation is essential for digestible reports and dashboards. Business charting needs to not only portray a true representation of the data, but must also be intuitive and dynamic in its use. Any user should be able to click around or drill into the chart/report to find the view that they need.
XLCubed v9.2 introduced new and improved animated small multiple charts (read more in this blog). They are an excellent solution for displaying single and multiple charts that can be used both in Excel and Web. Here we will showcase some examples of how these can be used!
Continue reading “Interactive Charting In Excel and Web”
//In this post we will walk through how to use XLCubed’s dashboard sheets to create a responsive dashboard within Excel, that will work on any device!
