Excel Dashboards and the Never Ending Journey
Over the holiday period between 2016 and 2017 I have had some time on my hands. That has been a rare commodity if you have followed my schedule over the last few years. I have really racked up the air miles with a flight on average every 2 weeks. I am not complaining I get to do what I love and take my ideas about financial modelling and Excel development to the world.
With this girth of time I decided this would best be used updating one of the favourite parts of my site - The Dashboard Wing. It is probably the highest ranking arm of the site according to Google but that is a moving feast. I am not sure how the Google algorithm works but I try to provide the best dashoboarding area available online and will let the chips fall where they will.
At any rate I began by looking at each dashboard (some now 4 years old) in turn and it turned out I have progressed a little and what once I thought was very nice now seemed somewhat bland and outdated. Here is an example.
I took the above image as a starting point and built in some additional features.
While the above Excel KPI Dashboard is quite serviceable it lacked some of the polish that my more recent iterations on the site have. So I set to work about changing the distance between the dashboads with little information and those with more data. The following is the result.
If you look closely at the set up, it is the same data, I have just added more information and changed the charting to provide what I feel is a cleaner, more robust message. I appreciate that this message is not for everyone. I have taken a journey into the world of financial infographics and now what I try to do is add relevant infographics to the world of financial dashboards. I think if this technique is done well the final result can be completely stunning. I am still learning my craft but the following is one I am most proud of.
There is a file which has all of the information at the following link:
Operational Dashboard Report
So as I opened more and more of my dashboards I found that they all needed to be updated. I have been updating the Excel files and re-posting the results in the dashboard section. I initially thought I would be updating 2-5 but it looks like I will update all of the dashboards and build some new ones too. Here is another update which I think was time well spent.
The process of updating the site is a time consuming task but I am loving the results which are adding considerably to the database of works. As always I hope you are enjoying thesmallman.com.
