Dashboard Reporting With Excel

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Dashboard Reporting With

Excel

Charles W. Kyd, MBA Founder, ExcelUser.com We offer an affiliate program that pays you cash when your clients, friends, and co-workers buy products from ExcelUser.com. For more information and additional copies of this book, please visit: http://www.ExcelUser.com/ Please do NOT distribute this book to others. It is for your use only. Unauthorized distribution constitutes theft of my intellectual property.

Dashboard Reporting With Excel By Charles W. Kyd, President ExcelUser.com

Published by ExcelUser.com Lynnwood, Washington All rights reserved. This book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd [email protected]

Warning and Disclaimer This book is designed to provide information about Microsoft Excel. Every effort has been made to make this book as complete and accurate as possible. The information is provided on an “as is” basis. The author and ExcelUser.com shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book or from the use of the spreadsheets that may accompany it.

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Table of Contents About Charles W. Kyd .......................................................................................... 7 Introduction........................................................................................................... 8 The Benefits of Dashboard Reporting............................................................... 8 Dashboard Reporting and Business Size ......................................................... 9 On-Screen or On-Paper Reporting? ............................................................... 10 Dashboard Reporting and Excel ..................................................................... 10 Sample Dashboard Files................................................................................. 11 Chapter 1. The Advantages of Dashboard Reporting With Excel ....................... 12 The Management-Reporting Pyramid ............................................................. 12 Excel Reports Offer Infinite Scope .................................................................. 13 Graphic Design ............................................................................................... 14 Chapter 2. How to Create Mini-Charts for Dashboard Reporting....................... 16 Getting Started................................................................................................ 16 How to Manage Legends ................................................................................ 17 How to Manage the X Axis.............................................................................. 17 How to Manage the Y Axis.............................................................................. 24 Miscellaneous Adjustments ............................................................................ 25 Chapter 3. Charting Techniques for Dashboard Reporting................................. 26 Adding a Data Series to a Chart ..................................................................... 26 Multiple Chart Types ....................................................................................... 27 Using the Primary Value Axis ...................................................................... 27 Using the Secondary Value Axis ................................................................. 28 Overlaid Charts ............................................................................................... 29 Using Auto Shapes in Charts.......................................................................... 31 Dynamic Text Boxes.................................................................................... 31 Unit-of-Measure Text Boxes........................................................................ 33 Down With Gauges! ........................................................................................ 36 Gauges Hide Trends ................................................................................... 36 Excel, Gauges, and Charts.......................................................................... 37 How to Create a Better Chart in Excel......................................................... 38 Chapter 4. Create Figures that Use Both Charts and Worksheets ..................... 39 Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].

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Simple Formatting........................................................................................... 39 Chart Formatting with Spreadsheet Cells .................................................... 39 Minimal Chart Formatting ............................................................................ 40 Row and Column Control................................................................................ 41 How to Resize All Your Charts at Once....................................................... 41 Forcing Charts to Work Together.................................................................... 43 How NOT to Set Up Y-Axis Common Scaling ............................................. 45 The Easy Way to Set Up Y-Axis Common Scaling...................................... 46 How to Set Up X-Axis Common Scaling...................................................... 51 Chapter 5. How to Use Excel’s Camera Tool ..................................................... 53 Set Up the Camera Tool ................................................................................. 53 An Introduction to the Camera Tool ................................................................ 54 Ways to Use the Camera Tool ........................................................................ 54 Display Tables with Different Column Widths and Row Heights.................. 54 Rotate Your Reports.................................................................................... 55 Mini Briefing Books...................................................................................... 57 Dynamic Cameras: Variable-Length Lists ................................................... 58 Dynamic Cameras: Traffic Lights ................................................................ 62 Dynamic Cameras: Shutters........................................................................ 66 Chapter 6. How to Funnel Data into Dashboard Reports ................................... 69 How Data Flows into Excel-Based Dashboards.............................................. 69 Common Types of Funnel Methods ................................................................ 70 Method 1: Build-From-Scratch Spreadsheet Reporting .............................. 70 Method 2: Spreadsheet Databases ............................................................ 72 Method 3: PivotTables................................................................................ 74 Method 4: Excel-Surly OLAPs .................................................................... 78 Method 5: Excel-Friendly OLAPs ............................................................... 81 Chapter 7. How to Use Spreadsheet Databases for Dashboard Reporting........ 83 How to Set Up the Excel Database................................................................. 84 The ActGL.xls Workbook............................................................................. 85 The BudGL.xls Workbook............................................................................ 88 The ActSales.xls Workbook......................................................................... 90 The FcstSales.xls Workbook ....................................................................... 91

Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].

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The Rolling-12 Worksheets ......................................................................... 91 How to Manage Workbook Generations ......................................................... 92 Chapter 8. How to Build Dashboard Reports in Excel ........................................ 93 The Structure of a Dashboard Workbook........................................................ 93 The Importance of Scope ............................................................................ 93 Additional Worksheets................................................................................. 94 An Overview of the Report Page..................................................................... 95 Step 1: Create a Mockup Report Page ........................................................... 96 Initialize the Page ........................................................................................ 96 Create and Position Your Mockup Figures .................................................. 98 Set Up the Rows and Columns ................................................................. 100 Position the Textbox in its Cells................................................................. 100 Complete the Mockup................................................................................ 101 An Alternate Method: Use Cell Borders..................................................... 101 Step 2: Determine Your Dashboard Design.................................................. 102 Format the Mockup.................................................................................... 103 Step 3: Add the Control Sheet and the First Data Sheet............................... 104 The Control Sheet ..................................................................................... 104 The First Data Sheet for Charts................................................................. 106 Step 4: Create the First Mini-Chart Figure. ................................................... 111 Step 5: Set Up Data for Other Charts. .......................................................... 112 Step 6: Set Up the Other Chart Figures. ....................................................... 112 Step 7: Set Up the Other Figures.................................................................. 113 Create the Balance Sheet ......................................................................... 113 Create the Income Statement.................................................................... 114 Create the Legend..................................................................................... 115 Color-Code the Sheet Tabs....................................................................... 115 Step 8: Make It All Fit.................................................................................... 116 Create a Parking Place.............................................................................. 116 Expand or Contract the Figures................................................................. 117 Set Up Alternate Figures ........................................................................... 118 How to Update Your Report Each Period ..................................................... 119 Chapter 9. Magazine-Quality Dashboard Designs............................................ 120 Online Business Week Figures ..................................................................... 120 Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].

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Other Online Sources ................................................................................... 126 Figures Clipped from Magazines & Newspapers .......................................... 128 Full-Page Magazine Displays ....................................................................... 134 Full-Page Excel Dashboards ........................................................................ 139 Appendix .......................................................................................................... 145 Display any Colors in Excel .......................................................................... 145 Additional Dashboard Resources.................................................................. 148 ExcelUser.com .......................................................................................... 148 Books by Edward Tuft ............................................................................... 148


About Charles W. Kyd

About Charles W. Kyd While working as a cost accountant at Hewlett Packard in the late 1970s, I beta tested VisiCalc. So I’ve been using spreadsheets for quite a while. As the CFO of several small companies in the 1980s, and later, as a consultant for a Big Eight accounting firm, I used about ten different brands of spreadsheets. The most unusual was Boeing Calc, a 3-D spreadsheet published by Boeing Corporation, the airplane manufacturer. But after I was introduced to the beta version of Excel for the PC, I’ve never looked back. I’ve written one book about financial management using the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, two similar books about Excel, and one book about programming Excel. I’ve published nearly 50 articles and columns in national magazines, including Inc, Management Accounting, Lotus, Byte, and Business Software. I consult for large and small companies in a wide variety of industries, helping them to use Excel and Excel-friendly OLAPs to improve management reporting, budgeting, forecasting, and analysis. In August, 2004, I launched www.ExcelUser.com. This is the only general web site I’ve found that’s dedicated to the business use of Microsoft Excel. Charley Kyd March, 2005 [email protected]

Introduction

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Introduction “Of all the frustrations of business life, surely one of the most aggravating and persistent is the flood of paper.” George, B. Blake, Graphic shorthand as an aid to managers, Harvard Business Review, March-April 1978.

Nearly 30 years have passed since Blake wrote those words. Although reporting technology has improved considerably in that time, his lament could have been offered today. Blake’s solution to the flood of paper was ground-breaking at the time: Use many small charts, or “mini-graphs”, on one sheet of paper to report management performance. “A chart can make a complex relationship much clearer than figures or words can and present it with less ambiguity,” Blake wrote. “The eye and mind can more quickly visualize a trend in a chart than in a table of figures.” Today, we call this general approach to management reporting, Dashboard Reporting.

The Benefits of Dashboard Reporting Dashboard reporting offers its readers several significant benefits. Dashboards can distill massive amounts of data into a single page of succinct results. Dashboard reports can reduce the flood of paper to a trickle. Dashboards can display a wide variety of results on one page. This allows managers to compare many results to each other, giving managers a more accurate view of their organization more quickly. With traditional reports, managers tend to compare many facts from


Introduction

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many reports received over many days; with dashboard reports, it’s all there in front of them. Dashboards easily can emphasize areas of performance that managers care most about. This is because dashboards are extremely modular. It’s very easy for Excel users to replace a chart or table that managers no longer care about with a figure that’s critically important. Dashboards aren’t only for managers.

Dashboard Reporting and Business Size All managers need the ability to step back from the details and see the bigger picture. Dashboards provide that picture. Most managers must report their performance to others. Managers of privately held businesses often must report to Board members, bankers, and spouses. Managers of public companies must report to others in the chain of command. Managers of both types of organization need to provide a clear picture of business performance. Dashboards provide that picture. Unfortunately, small companies and divisions typically can’t afford expensive software designed to support dashboard and other business reporting. This doesn’t need to be a problem, however, because small businesses typically have a simple organizational structure. They can use Excel-only reporting solutions that multiunit organizations have outgrown. This book provides spreadsheet techniques that companies of any size can use to improve their management reports. However, companies with several departments and divisions probably will find the use of spreadsheet databases too limiting. ExcelUser.com soon will offer supplements to this book, which will explain how to use Excel-friendly OLAP databases instead of Excel databases for dashboard reporting. Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].

Introduction

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On-Screen or On-Paper Reporting? As a general rule, dashboard reporting means paper reporting, for several reasons. From the point of view of the Excel users who prepare the reports, paper reports are easy to generate. Everyone knows how to print an Excel report. On the other hand, delivering dashboard results online typically means that the Information Technology department must get involved. From the point of view of the managers who receive the reports, dashboard reports are easier to work with when they’re on paper than on screen. Managers can glance through paper reports quickly. Managers can arrange a few pages side-by-side on their desk to view a hundred figures at once. They can write notes in the margins. They can fold the pages, stuff them into a pocket, and review the pages at their convenience. Even so, at times you’ll need to save dashboard reports as web files. Excel provides an easy way to do this. Near the end of this book we’ll explain how.

Dashboard Reporting and Excel The move to dashboard reporting largely has bypassed Excel. That is, many software products generate dashboard reports, but there are few resources—other than this book—to help Excel users create dashboard reports. This is a shame because, as the following pages demonstrate, Excel is an excellent tool for dashboard reporting. Excel provides users with significant power and flexibility for this task. And the incremental cost of dashboard reporting with Excel is essentially zero. What’s going on here? Why is Excel so underused for this application? Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].

Introduction

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I can think of three reasons. First, software companies can become quite successful selling proprietary software for dashboard reporting. But selling an Excel solution offers a tiny fraction of the sales potential. Therefore, few companies find it in their interest to promote Excel for this purpose. Second, few people have discovered the techniques needed to create high-quality dashboard reports with Excel. Although the techniques are relatively easy to use, they’re not obvious. Third, Excel easily is overlooked for high-quality reporting. Picture in your mind a typical Excel report produced by a typical Excel user. Compare that report with the pages shown on the cover of this book. It’s hard to believe that the same product—Excel—produced both sets of reports. It’s no wonder that people long accustomed to standard Excel reports would never think of using Excel for magazine-quality dashboard reports.

Sample Dashboard Files This book provides many figures and dashboard reports. It explains the techniques required to create these reports. However, this book doesn’t show all the data that was used, nor repetitively describe every single chart. If you would find it useful to have a full working version of one or more dashboard reports, you will find them available at ExcelUser.com. As new dashboards are developed, we will make them available on the web site.


Chapter 1. The Advantages of Dashboard Reporting With Excel

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Chapter 1. The Advantages of Dashboard Reporting With Excel Suppose you’re a manager. You’ve had a long day at work. Spreadsheet reports litter your desk. When you finally get home for the evening, you pick up a business magazine to unwind. But because you’re too tired to read anything, you just look at the pictures. Many of those “pictures” in your business magazine are small charts and tables…figures that summarize more data than the typical Excel reports that litter your desk. What’s going on here? Why is it work to look at data presented by most Excel reports? Why is it relaxation to look at data presented by business magazines? I think there are two reasons, both of which are influenced by the Management-Reporting Pyramid.

The Management-Reporting Pyramid Management reports should be designed like a pyramid. Top-level managers should receive fewer pages of standard reports than their direct-reports receive. But those pages should present a wider scope. This is common sense. Accounts payable clerks receive extensive data about each customer’s payment history. But their manager Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


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receives summary information about his entire department’s performance. Division managers receive extensive information about the performance of each department. But their group manager typically doesn’t care about department-level detail. “Typically” is the key word, however. Typically, a mechanic can look at the dashboard of his own car and know that everything is running as expected. But at times, a well-designed dashboard can signal that it’s time to look under the hood. For managers, “looking under the hood” typically involves meetings and more-detailed reports. But when the problems are under control, the detailed reports can be set aside. Reporting pyramids typically operate at many levels in an organization. People at each level need summary information about their own areas of responsibility. That is to say that dashboard reports should not be limited to senior managers and above.

Excel Reports Offer Infinite Scope One of the advantages of a magazine is that it offers virtually infinite scope. An article about employment trends in Vancouver easily could compare those trends to the price of tea in China. The next article could discuss personnel policies in Perth. A wide scope offers two significant benefits. First, it makes the publication more interesting to read. Second, it allows readers easily to compare various areas of performance. Similarly, Excel offers infinite scope and similar benefits. Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


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Think about it. A properly designed spreadsheet report could show trends in sales, headcounts, customer complaints, economic trends, interest rates, and manufacturing rework…all on the same printed page. And a figure about any of these topics could be replaced with another figure in minutes. Excel is the only software I know that allows companies to present data from many different sources in one report, and do so quickly. In the pages ahead, I’ll explain the techniques for doing this.

Graphic Design Ideally, benchmark reports should look like they came from a magazine or newspaper. This makes the reports both interesting and easy to read. As a rule, however, bean counters aren’t qualified to design magazine-quality reports, just as graphic artists aren’t qualified to design cost accounting systems. But bean counters can copy graphic designs they find in magazines and newspapers. C D E F G H I J KL AB To illustrate, the 4 5 Boeing vs EADS Head to Head graphic design for 6 7 The Fundamentals The Profit Picture: 8 this item came Boeing and EADS 9 10 Boeing 2001 2002 4 from a similar 11 Revenues ($ billion) $ 58.2 $ 54.1 12 Gross Profit ($ billion) $ 11.2 $ 10.1 3 13 Gross Profit Margin 19% 19% display that I 14 Net Income ($ billion) $ 2.8 $ 0.5 2 15 Net Profit Margin 4.9% 0.9% clipped from the 16 1 17 Wall Street Journal 18 0 EADS 2001 2002 19 Revenues ($ billion) $ 27.3 $ 31.3 20 -1 Gross Profit ($ billion) $ 4.9 $ 4.7 more than ten 21 Gross Profit Margin 18% 15% -2 22 Net Income ($ million) $ 1.2 -$ 0.3 years ago. If the 23 2000 2001 2002 Net Profit Margin 4.5% -1.0% 24 25 row and column 26 headings weren’t included with the figure, it never would look like it came from Excel. Annual net income in billions

You can find good-looking and data-rich report designs in nearly every business magazine and newspaper. Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times all print Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


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excellent charts and tables from time to time. Many other business publications offer other good examples. For additional examples, check old issues of these same publications in your local library. Business publications change their “look” occasionally, which can change the appearance and frequency of their charts and tables. To illustrate, my files have many pages of charts and tables from Fortune magazine in the early 1990s. But today, in 2004, Fortune rarely publishes a chart. Chapter 9 presents many examples of charts and tables printed in business magazines during the past 15 years. The description for each figure offers ideas for creating similar figures in Excel.


Chapter 2. How to Create Mini-Charts for Dashboard Reporting

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Chapter 2. How to Create MiniCharts for Dashboard Reporting The most common mistake that Excel users make when they create charts is to make their charts too large. Large charts make it difficult for readers to absorb information in one glance. Small charts don’t have this problem. Large charts use up valuable space on a page. They force readers to flip back and forth between pages to compare results. Small charts let readers compare many measures of performance on a single page. For management reporting, don’t use charts; use mini-charts. Unfortunately, mini-charts take extra work to produce.

Getting Started Create a simple line chart that shows twelve months of performance, and then click and drag a corner to reduce its size past your level of comfort. Excel will reduce the chart’s font size to microscopic. To fix this problem, select the Chart Area then choose Format, Selected Chart Area. In the Font tab, set the font size to 8 points. (For the sake of readers past the age of 40, please don’t be tempted to reduce the font size below this setting.) Also, in the Font tab, de-select the Auto Scale check box. This forces Excel to keep the font size you set. By default, Excel shades the Plot Area. To remove the shading, select the Plot Area and choose Format, Selected Plot Area. In the Patterns tab, specify an Area color of None. Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


Sales $10,000.00 $8,000.00 $6,000.00 $4,000.00 $2,000.00 $Oct-04

Jun-04

Sales Feb-04

When you complete these changes, you’ll get an ugly result that looks something like this figure. Here, there’s virtually no room for the plot area because each set of labels has a higher priority.

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To a large degree, the art of creating mini charts is the art of managing those chart labels.

How to Manage Legends Sales $10,000.00 $8,000.00 $6,000.00 $4,000.00 $2,000.00 $-

Fe b0 Ap 4 r04 Ju n0 Au 4 g04 O ct -0 D 4 ec -0 4

As a general rule, chart legends take up more space than they’re worth. With mini charts, therefore, the best choice is to delete the legends.

Here, for example, we’ve lost nothing by deleting the legend, and we’ve gained a significant increase in the size of the plot area. Chapter 8 explains how to add legends when you need them.

How to Manage the X Axis Because mini-charts typically contain dates in the X axis, I’ll concentrate on that issue here. The following section describes ways to compress numbers in the Y axis. If your chart uses other data in the X axis, you can adapt the techniques for both axes to your needs. Mini-charts usually display trends. And very frequently for internal reporting, charts display a one-year trend.



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When you reduce the size of a chart, you’ll need to pay particular attention to the X axis. In the previous figure, for example, the dates are unacceptable for several reasons.

Label the current month One problem with the dates is that the right-most value—the value for the current month—isn’t labeled. This chart ends with January’s data, and that data point needs to be labeled. Labeling the current month isn’t easy to do, however, if your chart displays twelve months of data. Whether you label every other month, or every three months, the right-most month is left without a label. Sales $10,000.00 $8,000.00 $6,000.00 $4,000.00 $2,000.00 $-

Ja n0 M 4 ar -0 M 4 ay -0 4 Ju l-0 Se 4 p0 N 4 ov -0 Ja 4 n05

The solution, surprisingly, is to add one more month of data to your chart. When you include 13 months of data, Excel displays both the first and last month, as this figure illustrates.

From the reader’s point of view, this tends to be a popular change. When a chart shows 13 months of data, readers are able to compare the current month’s performance to the performance one year ago—a comparison that interests most readers.

Set the Y-axis crossing

This effect causes the plot area to be wider than it should. It also makes it more difficult for

Sales $10,000.00 $8,000.00 $6,000.00 $4,000.00 $2,000.00 $-

Ja n0 M 4 ar -0 M 4 ay -0 4 Ju l-0 Se 4 p0 N 4 ov -0 4 Ja n05

Notice in the chart above that the trend line floats within the plot area.



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readers to know which label aligns with which point on the chart’s line. To correct these problems, select the chart’s X axis then choose Format, Selected Axis. In the Scale tab of the Format Axis dialog de-select the check-box “Value (Y) axis crosses between dates”. This change will anchor the chart line on the left and right axes, as shown in the previous figure.

Return X-axis labels to their vertical orientation When you make a chart small, Excel displays the labels at an angle, as shown in previous figures. These angled labels are difficult to read and take up too much space. We therefore need to return them to a vertical orientation. To correct the orientation, select the X axis in the chart. Choose Format, Selected Axis. Choose the Alignment tab of the Format Axis dialog. The Automatic radio button will be selected. To de-select it, click the up arrow in the Degrees scroll bar, and then click the down arrow. After you do so, the Degrees will be set to zero, but the automatic radio button will be deselected. After you make this change, the chart will look worse, as shown here. But that’s okay. We’ll fix it in the next step.

Sales $10,000.00 $8,000.00 $6,000.00 $4,000.00 $2,000.00 $Ja Ma Ma J Se No Ja n- r- y- ul- p- v- n04 04 04 04 04 04 05



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Adjust the Date Formats You have several options for your date formats. Which option you choose depends on how small you want your chart to be and which date format your audience prefers. A B C D In most cases, however, you’ll give 1 Sales yourself more power and flexibility if 2 1/1/04 Jan 04 $ 2,878.00 3 2/1/04 Feb 04 $ 3,835.00 you maintain two sets of dates, one to provide the date values and the other to provide the date labels. To illustrate, this figure shows the top of a chart’s data range. Column B provides the date values, and column C provides the labels for presentation in the chart.

You have at least three options for how you format the date labels in column C. Each choice displays the date in two rows. If your mini-chart is small, but not tiny, you might have room to display a three-character month in the X axis, as shown here. In this case, you would enter this formula in the cell shown below, and then copy the formula down the column as needed. C2:

Sales $10,000.00 $8,000.00 $6,000.00 $4,000.00 $2,000.00 $Jan 04

Apr 04

Jul 04

Oct 04

Jan 05

=TEXT($B2,"mmm")&CHAR(13)&TEXT($B2,"yy")

Here, the first TEXT function returns a month label like “Jan” or “Oct”. The CHAR(13) function returns the carriage-return character, which causes the remaining text to wrap to a second line in the chart. And the second TEXT function displays the year, using two characters.



If you need additional horizontal space, your can replace the text for each month with its number. Doing so displays the date as illustrated here.

Sales $10,000.00 $8,000.00 $6,000.00 $4,000.00 $2,000.00 $1 04

To create this effect, use a formula like this: C2:

3 04

5 04

7 04

9 04

11 04

1 05

=TEXT($B2,"m")&CHAR(13)&TEXT($B2,"yy")

Your third choice is a variation that you can apply to either of the earlier choices. As shown here, it leaves the X-axis less cluttered than otherwise. To use this approach, leave the first and last date formulas as they were, but change the other formulas to either of these options: C3: C3:

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Sales $10,000.00 $8,000.00 $6,000.00 $4,000.00 $2,000.00 $Jan 04

Apr

Jul

Oct

Jan 05

Sales $10,000.00 $8,000.00 $6,000.00 $4,000.00 $2,000.00 $-

=TEXT($B3,"mmm") =TEXT($B3,"m")

1 04

3

5

7

9

11

1 05

Adjust the tick-mark label frequency As you can see from the two figures above, Excel still is automatically setting the tick-mark label frequency. In the of these, Excel displays a label every three months, and in the second, every two months. To specify the number of months between labels, select the X-axis and choose Format, Selected Axis. In the Scale tab of the Format Axis dialog, enter the value you want in the text box that is labeled “Number of categories between tick-mark labels.” Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


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You have a lot of flexibility with this setting, because a label can overlap the area available to other labels. To illustrate, this figure shows that the complete “January” label extends into the space where the February and March labels would go. If you set the number of tick marks between labels at 1, the labels would overlap, making the X-axis labels illegible.

Sales $10,000.00 $8,000.00 $6,000.00 $4,000.00 $2,000.00 $January Jan Apr May Jul Sep Oct 04

Jan 05

An Aside: How Not to Display Two Rows of X-Axis Labels Some Excel references suggest a different way to display two rows of labels for the X axis.

Sales 10 8 6 4 2 0

Instead of wrapping one column of labels in your spreadsheet, JanFebMarA prMaJunJulAu SeOctNoDeJan these sources say, you should 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 05 set up two columns of labels in your spreadsheet, and display them both in your chart. As this figure illustrates, this suggestion creates several problems. The worst of these is that this method inserts a double-space between the rows of labels, forcing the axis to take up more vertical height that we want. Second, this method imposes three changes to the chart’s formats: •

Tick marks turn into vertical borders.

•

Labels must be associated with each period. You no longer can display labels every two or three periods.



•

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The option, “Value (Y) axis cross between categories” always is checked.

However, if you want to experiment with this alternate method, here’s how to use it: Set up two adjacent columns of labels. In the example, one column would contain the month and the other would contain the year. The label that should be displayed in the second row of your chart should appear in the first column of your spreadsheet. The SERIES function takes these arguments… =SERIES(name_ref, categories, values, plot_order) …where : • name_ref—provides the chart’s name. • categories—generally, provides the Y-axis labels. • values—provides the values to be plotted. • plot_order—specifies whether the series is plotted first, second, and so on. Edit your SERIES formula to reference these columns for the new labels. For example, you change the formula from something like: =SERIES(Sheet1!$D$1, Sheet1!$C$2:$C$14, Sheet1!$D$2:$D$14,1) …to… =SERIES(Sheet1!$D$1, Sheet1!$O$2:$P$14, Sheet1!$D$2:$D$14,1)



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Here, I’ve underlined the argument that has changed in the second version.

How to Manage the Y Axis The Y axis often has the same problem as the X axis: It takes up too much horizontal space. We therefore need to find ways to reduce that space.

Sales $10,000.00 $8,000.00 $6,000.00 $4,000.00 $2,000.00 $Jan

Apr

Jul

Oct

Jan

Two steps are obvious. One 04 05 step is to remove the dollar sign, or other currency symbol. The other step is to display the Y axis using fewer zeros.

To remove the currency symbol, select the data in your spreadsheet. Choose Format, Cells. Choose the Number tab in the Format Cells dialog. In the list of categories, choose Custom. Then enter the format code: #,##0, Be sure to enter the comma that follows the zero in this number format. That comma tells Excel to display results to the nearest thousands of dollars, not to the nearest dollar.

Sales 10 8 6 4 2 0 Jan Apr Jul Oct Jan 04 05

After you adjust the Y-axis formats, you probably can reduce the width of your chart even more. The chart in this figure is half the width of the chart in the previous figure. This change has created several problems, of course. This chart doesn’t tell us whether sales were 10 dollars or 10 million euros. Chapter 8 explains how to fix this problem.



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Miscellaneous Adjustments To complete the chart we have one necessary adjustment to make, and one optional adjustment. The necessary adjustment is to remove the chart’s title. It takes up too much space in the chart and reduces flexibility in your spreadsheet. To remove the title, click on the Chart Title object in the chart, and then press the Delete key.Then reduce the size of the chart object to recover the space that the title had used.

10 8 6 4 2 0 Jan Apr Jul Oct Jan 04 05


The chart does need a title, of course. I’ll explain how to replace the title later in Chapter 8, using a more flexible approach. The optional adjustment is to add gridlines, as shown in the second figure. First select the chart object and then choose Chart, Chart Options. In the Gridlines tab, select the Major gridlines check box in the Category (X) Axis section. Second, modify the gridlines so that they display every quarter, not every month. To do so, first select the X axis. Choose Format, Selected Axis. In the Scale tab, enter 3 in the text box labeled “Number of categories between tick marks.” These figures show the final results for this stage of development. We have charts that are missing key information, but which display our data in a space that’s not much larger than a postage stamp. Of course, you might object that you don’t want your charts this small. But with these techniques available, you have the flexibility to make your charts as large or as small as you want. You no longer face limits that appeared to be imposed by Excel’s chart object. Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].

Chapter 3. Charting Techniques for Dashboard Reporting

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Chapter 3. Charting Techniques for Dashboard Reporting You can use a variety of techniques to give your charts the appearance they need. This chapter describes some of the most common of these.

Adding a Data Series to a Chart Suppose you create a chart that shows spending for the Marketing Department for each month in the past year. You show it to your boss, who says, “That’s great, but what was the budget?” So now you need to add a data series for Marketing’s budget. In Excel, you have at least three ways to do this. They all can produce the same results. But if you know all three methods you can choose the one that would be easiest in a particular circumstance. First, the quickest method probably is to copy the new data to your chart. To do so, copy your range of data, including the column title. Select the Chart Area. When you do so, the edge of the chart will display the markers shown here. Paste the data to the chart. Then edit the new SERIES formula to ensure that Excel has set it up correctly. Second, you can use an Excel dialog to add a data series. To do so, select the Chart Area. Choose Chart, Source Data. In the Source Data dialog, choose the Series tab. Then in the Name, Values, and Category edit boxes, select the data ranges that you want your new series to reference. You also can manually edit the formulas shown. Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


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Third, you can copy an existing SERIES function as a new series, and then modify it to meet your needs. To do so, select the Chart Area, and then select a data series to copy. Select the entire SERIES formula in the formula bar and then press the Ctrl-C key combination to copy this formula to the clipboard. Select the Chart Area again. Paste the copied formula into the formula bar, and then modify the formula as needed.

Multiple Chart Types One chart can display different chart types for different data series. These new chart types can be linked to the primary value (Y) axis, or to the secondary one. Let’s consider each method.

Using the Primary Value Axis The first figure at the right shows two data series. The jagged line shows actual spending; the smooth line shows budgeted spending. Let’s display the budget as an area chart. To do so, select the budget line in the first figure. Choose Chart, Chart Type. In the Chart Type dialog, choose the Area type and the top-left chart sub-type. To format the area and border colors, select the area data series. Choose Format, Selected Data Series. Then assign the colors you want in the Patterns tab of that dialog.



The second figure above uses colors that aren’t standard with Excel. See ExcelUser.com for the article Display Any Colors in Excel.



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Using the Secondary Value Axis Suppose you want to compare sales and budgets on the one hand to an industry price index on the other. Sales are in the thousands of dollars and the price index varies between zero and one. You can’t display both sets of data using the same axis.

10 8 6 4 2 0 Jan Apr 04

1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 Jul Oct Jan 05

Therefore, as this figure illustrates, you display the price index using the secondary axis. To do so, first add the data series to your chart. Then select the data series. Sometimes, however, it’s difficult to select a specific data series with your mouse, because the series hugs the X axis, or because two data series overlap. If so, select any data series and then press your Up-Arrow or Down-Arrow keys to move from series to series until you select the series that you want. Choose Format, Data Series. In the Data Series dialog, choose the Axis tab and then choose the Secondary axis radio button. In the same dialog, choose the Patterns tab and set the marker to none. Then choose OK. If practical, you can use colors, as shown above, to provide a visual clue about which data series belong to which axis.



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Overlaid Charts Excel area charts are displayed on top of gridlines, not behind them. So how did I create this Excel chart with gridlines on top? Considering this section title, the answer must have something to do with overlaid charts. The previous figure was made up of these two chart objects, with the second of these placed exactly on top of the first. By overlaying the two chart objects, I created one image with the gridlines on top. This solution offers the only way to present one chart figure that displays chart items on top of items that Excel normally displays beneath.

10 8 6 4 2 0 Jan Apr 04

1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 Jul Oct Jan 05

10 8 6 4 2 0 Jan Apr 04

1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 Jul Oct Jan 05

10 8 6 4 2 0 Jan Apr 04

1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 Jul Oct Jan 05

To set up this effect, first create one chart object with all formatting and data required by both charts. Then copy the chart object.

In the first chart object, hide all unnecessary chart items. Hide borders and data series by formatting the patterns for the borders and areas as None. For fonts, set their color to that of the chart’s background color, usually white. Also set the font’s background color to Transparent. After you hide each object, the first chart will look somewhat like the top figure above.



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As you hide each chart object, make sure that you do nothing to change the structure of the chart. For example, if you remove the labels rather than turning them white, your chart would change shape. You want the labels to exist in the first chart, you just don’t want to see them. The second chart object is the reverse of the first. It displays what you previously hid, and hides what you previously displayed. Also, you make the second chart transparent. To do so, select its chart area and choose Format, Selected Chart Area. In the Patterns tab of the Format Chart Area dialog, set its Area to None. For the final step, you must exactly position the second chart object on top of the first. You do this by positioning the first chart object exactly within a range of cells; then you position the second object in the same range. The easiest way to do this is to press the Alt key as you click and drag the first chart object. As you do so, the chart will jump from cell to cell, positioning its top-left corner exactly in the top-left corner of a cell. Once that corner is positioned, click and drag the chart object’s bottom-right corner while pressing Alt. Then arrange the second chart object similarly.



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Using Auto Shapes in Charts You’ll often find it useful to add a text box or other Auto Shape to charts. Here, for example, I used a text box to provide the unit of measure for the primary Y axis. I used a callout to comment on a point in the chart. And I used another text box as an alert that we were over budget.

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Apr

▲T ho us a nd $

1.0 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 Bad month. 0.2 0.1 0.0 Jul Oct Jan 05

Over Budget

The unit-of-measure label is more useful than the callout. This is because the callout only can be used with the current instance of the chart. When the data changes, the callout won’t adapt. The third label does adapt, as you’ll see. The key to adding Auto Shapes to charts is to select the Chart Area before you choose a shape. By doing so, you add the shape to the chart object itself. On the other hand, if a cell is active when you select a shape, the new shape won’t become part of the chart.

Dynamic Text Boxes The Over Buget text box is dynamic. That is, it points to a worksheet formula that chooses the text to display. The cell that contains this formula also determines the text box’s format, to some degree. To set up a dynamic text box, first enter a short phrase into a cell. Format its font as you want it to appear in your chart. Then add a text box to your chart. A quick way to add a dynamic text box to your chart is to choose the Chart Area, enter “=” (without the quotes) in the formula bar,



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then select the cell that you want the text box to reference. When you press Enter, Excel will create the text box for you. Or, with an existing text box selected, type an equal sign in the formula bar and then click on the cell with the formatted text. After you press Enter, the text box typically will change positions in your chart and will display the formatted text in the cell you referenced. You can click and drag the text box into position. The text box maintains a dynamic link to the contents of the referenced cell. If the text changes in the cell, the text will change in your text box. One limitation to this approach is that the format isn’t dynamic. The text box adapts the initial format in the source cell. If the cell format changes, the format doesn’t change automatically in the text box. The source cell in your spreadsheet can have any formula you want. Typically, it would look something like this: =IF(SomeCell=TRUE, “Alert Message”, “”) Here, if the value SomeCell is TRUE, your chart displays “Alert Message”. Otherwise, your chart displays nothing.



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Unit-of-Measure Text Boxes Look again at the text box that shows the unit of measure for the Y axis. Newspapers and magazines use this type of label extensively, and it works well with Excel.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3

1.0 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 Bad month. 0.2 0.1 0.0 Jul Oct Jan 05

2 This text box takes up very little 1 space, particularly because it uses 0 a smaller font than the rest of the Jan Apr 04 chart. Even so, it’s very readable. In Over Budget ▲T ho us a nd $ fact it’s much more readable and takes up much less space than Excel’s default Y-axis label.

To insert the arrow symbol in the unit-of-measure label, select the edit area of the text box. Choose Insert, Symbol. Then choose the symbol you want. In dashboards, the unit-of-measure text often will be dynamic, for at least two reasons. First, you can specifiy the power of ten. Second, you can specify the currency symbol.

Dynamic Power-of-Ten Text It’s common for one report to round a dataset to the nearest thousand in a chart and another report to round to the nearest million. In manual charts we typically shift the decimal place by using number formats. To illustrate, if the raw number is 1234567.89: •

We round to 1,234.6 with number format: #,##0.0,

•

We round to 1.2 with number format: #,##0.0,,

The difference between these formats isn’t obvious. One ends with one comma; the other ends with two commas. Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


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The problem with using number formats is that we can’t adjust them dynamically. Therefore, we must adjust the data itself. To adust the power of ten dynamically, set up your data in two ranges. The first range contains your raw data. The second range contains the modified data that you chart. Typically, the second range is modified only with regard to the position of its decimal points. To illustrate, suppose your raw data is in a range named RawData. You could rely on a cell named Scale that has a formula that’s something like this: =IF(MAX(RawData)DataRows, $B$31:$E$32, $A$25) And the name Shutter3 is defined as: =IF($C$27>DataRows, $B$31:$E$32, $A$27) To set up the shutter for slot 3, select any cell, click on the Camera icon, then click on any cell. Right-click on the Camera object and choose Format Picture. In the Colors and Lines tab, specify No Fill and No Line. Then change the Camera object’s formula in the tool bar to =Shutter3.

A B C D E F Top Regions 1 2 # Region Score 1 New York 193 3 2 California 179 4 3 Kansas 165 5 4 Alabama 161 6 5 Montana 157 7 5 #N/A #N/A 8 5 #N/A #N/A 9 5 #N/A #N/A 10 5 #N/A #N/A 11 5 #N/A #N/A 12 13 14 DataRows 5 15 Slots 3 16 PageCount 1 17 Pages 2 18 19 Top Regions 20 # Region 21 22 1 New York 23 1 Score: 193 24 2 California 25 2 2 Score: 179 26 3 Kansas 27 3 3 Score: 165 28 29 30 31 32

Position the object in cell B27. (The 3 that appears in cell B27 is returned by the Camera object.)

Similarly, set up the shutter for slot 2, and move the Camera object to cell B25. To see how the Camera object works with Shutter3, suppose the page count is 1. In this case, cell C27 contains the value 3, which is less than 5. Therefore, the Camera returns a picture of cell A27. But when the page count is 2, cell C27 contains 6, which is greater than 5. Therefore, the Camera returns a picture of the range B31:E32, a picture that hides the contents of the range C27:E28. Shutter 2 works similarly.


Chapter 6. How to Funnel Data into Dashboard Reports

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Chapter 6. How to Funnel Data into Dashboard Reports Dashboard reporting offers an effective way for readers to monitor business performance, quickly and easily. But how can Excel’s dashboard workbooks interact with that data easily? This chapter describes various strategies to funnel source data into dashboard reports.

How Data Flows into Excel-Based Dashboards Figure 6-1 illustrates the data-flow structure of an Excel-based dashboard report. At the top of the figure we have a cloud of business data. It could be internal and external, past and projected, all from a wide variety of sources. And much of it is updated constantly. At the bottom, we have a dashboard report. This report is linked by Excel formulas to well-defined spreadsheet cells.

Figure 6-1. For dashboards to update easily, we must find a simple way to update their data ranges in Excel.

The report doesn’t care where in the cloud its data comes from, nor how the cells of data were filled. It only talks with the cells. And though the cells can get their data from different sources, they have a rigid structure. Deleting, sorting, or moving one or more cells typically will break the report.



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This chapter discusses the question mark…the ways by which Excel users can funnel source data into spreadsheet cells.

Common Types of Funnel Methods Different funnel methods—different ways by which you fill spreadsheet cells with data to be reported—can make the difference between spreadsheet heaven and spreadsheet hell. In my experience, Excel users commonly use five different methods to populate their spreadsheets. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. These five methods tend to differ with regard to the process that updates Excel spreadsheets. I refer to these as push and pull. A push process writes (copies) data to spreadsheet cells. Typically with this approach you interact with some other program, giving it the instructions needed to send data to Excel. A pull process puts your worksheet in control. It uses worksheet formulas to return data from local or central databases. For spreadsheet users, pull is much more powerful and convenient than push. With a pull approach, our spreadsheet formulas are in control. When we want to look at a different set of data we change the values of one or more cells (we specify a new month or a new department, for example) and then recalculate. Push programs aren’t nearly so Excel-friendly.

Method 1: Build-From-Scratch Spreadsheet Reporting This has been the most common method of spreadsheet reporting since I used the first spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, in 1979. The idea is simple. First, you populate your spreadsheet with unstructured data. You might enter the data manually. You might Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


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import text files, or other file formats. You might copy and paste data from some other source. Or you might use all of these methods in one report. If you want to be careful, you then reconcile your spreadsheet data with the source, to reduce the possibility of data-entry errors. Then you massage the data. You sort it. Summarize it. Combine it with other data. Create columns of formulas to analyze it. And you modify it to create consistent labels for dates, descriptions, account codes, and other meta data. Finally, hours later, the report is done…and somewhat error-free. If the report turns out to be useful it becomes a continual cause of spreadsheet hell. This is because weekly, or monthly, you must repeat that same manual process.

The Advantages Flexibility is about the only advantage to manual spreadsheet reporting. It offers Excel users no constraints. You start with an empty spreadsheet, and the rest is up to you.

The Disadvantages This approach offers many disadvantages. Most of these can be summarized in one term: spreadsheet hell. Additionally, this approach is the most error-prone of any method used to populate reports. In these days of Sarbanes Oxley, that’s a very serious disadvantage.



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Method 2: Spreadsheet Databases This is the next logical step above manual spreadsheet reporting. Rather than manually massaging the same historical data each month, it makes sense to massage each month’s data once, save the transformed data in a spreadsheet database, and then use those results for subsequent reports. An INDEX-MATCH formula combination is typically used to retrieve data from a spreadsheet database. To illustrate, suppose a spreadsheet database contains the GL trial balance for several months. Suppose column A contains the Account number; column B contains the Description; and column C contains the Current month’s data, retrieved by formula from subsequent columns of monthly data. The formula needed to return the description for account “1234” would be… =INDEX(Description, MATCH(“1234”,Account,0)) …and the formula to return the current amount would be… =INDEX(Current, MATCH(“1234”,Account,0)) Because Excel formulas pull data from the spreadsheet database, this uses the pull approach to populate spreadsheet cells.

The Advantages Using spreadsheet databases can save a great deal of time when compared to the build-from-scratch method. This is because users need to massage the data only once, and then they store it in the spreadsheet database. Also, this is a very flexible approach, because spreadsheet databases can contain data from any source, internal or external.



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The Disadvantages Typical spreadsheet databases have many disadvantages. These are the most common: Errors. They tend to include many errors, because they seldom undergo rigorous error-checking. Reconciliation problems. Companies that rely on spreadsheet databases typically have similar databases maintained by several people. These seldom reconcile. Additionally, each user tends to keep many generations of spreadsheet databases in multiple workbooks. Often, these many generations don’t reconcile. External links. It’s not unusual for one Excel user to link his report to a spreadsheet database maintained by another Excel user…who gets some of her data from yet another user. Those many external links represent a house of cards that certainly will collapse at exactly the worst-possible moment, breaking a critical report. Lack of power. Spreadsheet databases aren’t a very powerful solution. One reason for this is that they’re only two-dimensional databases in a multi-dimensional world. To illustrate, they can report by account and month; but they can’t easily report by account, by month, by department, by division. Another reason they aren’t very powerful is that they can’t handle hierarchical information easily. For example, they can contain spending by GL account. But they can’t easily return, say, total marketing expenses, which is the sum of specific GL accounts. Yet another reason is that spreadsheet databases can’t contain much data. This often doesn’t seem to be true, because some



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spreadsheet databases reside in some very large workbooks. Even so, when you compare the amount of data in a large spreadsheet database with the data typically contained by real databases, spreadsheet databases contain significantly less data.

An Improved Spreadsheet Database In spite of the foregoing problems, I’ve developed a spreadsheet methodology that can avoid most of them—at least for companies with only one unit. Chapter 7 introduces this methodology, and Chapter 8 explains how to use it to create and update dashboard reports using an allExcel solution.

Method 3: PivotTables Excel has offered PivotTable technology for years. It’s a powerful way to populate worksheet cells with data from relational databases. PivotTables have been around for a long time, and it’s the primary way that Microsoft offers for bringing external data into Excel. For these reasons, Excel’s help engine offers excellent advice about how to set up PivotTables.

Using the GETPIVOTDATA function Once you set up a PivotTable report in a worksheet, you typically use the GETPIVOTDATA worksheet function to return data from the visible cells of the pivot data. The function has two forms. The form explained in Excel’s help file is… GETPIVOTDATA(data_field,pivot_table,field1,item1,field2,item2,...) …where:



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data_field is the name, enclosed in quotation marks, for the field of data that you want to retrieve. pivot_table is any cell or range of cells in the pivot table, which tells Excel which PivotTable report to use. field1, item1, field2, item2… are matched pairs of field names and item names that describe the data you want to retrieve.

The alternate form is… GETPIVOTDATA(pivot_table, name) …where… pivot_table, as in the first version, is any cell or range of cells in the pivot table, which tells Excel which PivotTable report to use. name is a text string that describes the data you want to summarize, as the following examples illustrate. Note that this version returns an error value if two different fields have members with the same name, and you use one of those names with this version of GETPIVOTDATA. The following examples illustrate both variations. Suppose this table contains raw data to report. We easily can use the PivotTable Wizard to create a PivotTable report, as shown on the next page.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

A B C D Month Division Acct Amount 1/1/2005 A 100 553 1/1/2005 A 200 714 1/1/2005 A 300 6 1/1/2005 B 100 430 1/1/2005 B 200 729 1/1/2005 B 300 246 2/1/2005 A 100 670 2/1/2005 A 200 64 2/1/2005 A 300 799 2/1/2005 B 100 948 2/1/2005 B 200 563 2/1/2005 B 300 884



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This is a PivotTable report based on the previous Excel table. The following formulas illustrate ways to return data from this report. For clarity, I’ll label the two versions of the function: A: =GETPIVOTDATA(data_field, pivot_table, field1, item1, field2, item2,...) B: = GETPIVOTDATA(pivot_table, name) A: =GETPIVOTDATA("Amount",$A$3) B: =GETPIVOTDATA($A$3,"Grand Total") B: =GETPIVOTDATA($A$3,"Amount") B: =GETPIVOTDATA($A$3,"Sum of Amount") All versions return 2806, the Grand Total for the PivotTable report. A: =GETPIVOTDATA("Amount", $A$3, "Month", "2/1/2005") A: =GETPIVOTDATA("Amount", $A$3, "Month", "2/1/2005", "Division", "A") B: =GETPIVOTDATA($A$3,"2/1/2005") B: =GETPIVOTDATA($A$3,"2/1/2005 A") All return 1533, which is Division A’s total for 2/1/2005. Specifying page fields (here, the Division code) is optional for either the A or B variation. A: =GETPIVOTDATA("Amount", $A$3, "Month", "2/1/2005", "Acct", "200") B: =GETPIVOTDATA($A$3,"2/1/2005 200") Both return 64. A: =GETPIVOTDATA("Amount",$A$3, "Acct","200") B: =GETPIVOTDATA($A$3,"200") Both return 778.



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Notice that pivot tables rely on a combination of push and pull. Spreadsheet cells can pull their data from each PivotTable report. But users must interact with PivotTable page fields, telling them which pages of data to write—push—into the PivotTable report. The Advantages PivotTables funnel data from relational and spreadsheet databases into spreadsheet cells. When they are used with centrally stored relational databases, PivotTables significantly reduce the problems associated with spreadsheet databases. Because PivotTables have been widely used for at least ten years, they are well-documented in books, help files, and newsgroups. It’s relatively easy to find PivotTable experts on the web.

The Disadvantages For centralized data, PivotTables rely on relational databases. This creates several problems. • These databases typically are controlled by the Information Technology department, which seldom ranks the needs of Excel users as their highest priority. • It’s often difficult for users to add new databases to this system. • Meta data (like product and department codes) isn’t necessarily consistent among all databases from which users might report. This complicates spreadsheet analyses, because the same type of data has different names in different databases. This is a particular challenge after a merger or acquisition, because it might take years for IT to combine two dissimilar General Ledger systems, and their dissimilar charts of account.



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• PivotTables rely on SQL queries that can have subtle differences between two queries written by two different people. This increases the likelihood that two reports that logically should reconcile…won’t. • External data typically isn’t available from IT. When PivotTables link to large files over the network, the response time can be quite slow. Excel formulas only can reference data that PivotTables return to spreadsheet cells. This forces Excel users to interact with PivotTables to update their data, rather than interacting only with Excel.

Method 4: Excel-Surly OLAPs Many OLAP database products are on the market. Most of them aren’t Excel-friendly. I call them Excel surly. Excel-surly OLAPs lack at least one of two key features offered by Excel-friendly OLAPs. First, Excel-surly OLAPs write data as values to cells in Excel. They push data into Excel. On the other hand, Excel-friendly OLAPs return data using spreadsheet formulas. They pull data from OLAP cells into Excel. The pull approach is much more powerful than the push approach, and easier to use: • Using formulas leaves your spreadsheet in control. To report some other month, or some other department, you just change the month and department values in their respective cells and then recalculate.



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• Formulas simplify automation. Suppose you want to report performance trends about a list of products. A simple macro could enter the first product code in a cell, recalculate, print, enter the second code, and so on. Your macro doesn’t know or care that the data comes from an Excel-friendly OLAP. • Formulas simplify training. Excel users can ignore 90% of the user interface of Excel-friendly OLAPs. This is because Excel users report and analyze using Excel, not the OLAP program. To illustrate the different levels of knowledge required, I once attended the training class for new users of a well-known Excelsurly OLAP. The class dragged on for five long days, teaching clerks and accountants about datablocks, scenario partitioning, leaf node loading, and other mind-numbing topics. In contrast, the equivalent training for new-hires in companies that use an Excel-friendly OLAP often tends to be, “Do this, this, and this, which creates a worksheet with formulas linked to a cube. Here’s a sample report to play with. If you have any questions, ask anyone.” The second major shortcoming of Excel-surly OLAPs is that they tend to offer spreadsheet access to only one cube at a time. On the other hand, Excel-friendly OLAPs offer spreadsheet access to an unlimited number of cubes at one time. As a practical matter, however, Excel-friendly OLAPs tend to use a small number of cubes. In this environment, each cube provides one unique data set. To illustrate, most companies have one GL cube, which contains GL data for all months for all divisions and subsidiaries that use the same chart of accounts. (Recent acquisitions, which typically use different charts of account, would use different GL cubes. The main



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GL cube would contain their translated GL data for company-wide consolidation.) Companies also can have a sales cube, a headcount cube, a cube of operating data, a cube with competitor data, and so on. In contrast, some Excel-surly OLAPs can have hundreds of cubes, which users can access only one at a time. They can have dozens of sales cubes and dozens of GL cubes, each slightly different from the other. In this environment, users must sift through many versions of the truth, which often don’t agree. As a consequence of the problems associated with Excel-surly OLAPs, this book offers no hands-on advice for working with them. If it did, this slim volume probably would need to be the size of the New York City phone book.



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Method 5: Excel-Friendly OLAPs Figure 6-2 illustrates how an Excel-friendly OLAP works. Here, OLAP cubes contain multi-dimensional data from any source. Excel-friendly OLAPs offer several ways to update these cubes easily. Cubes typically reside on a cube server, and are available to all users. In single-user versions, cubes reside locally. Users link to cubes using spreadsheet formulas. Other spreadsheet formulas can return related information about data in the cubes.

The Advantages I’ve used various Excelfriendly OLAP products for more than ten years. I see many advantages and few disadvantages. I’ll limit myself to the major advantages.

Figure 6-2. Excel-friendly OLAPs allow multi-dimensional data to flow easily from a large data store into spreadsheet cells and then into dashboards.

Excel-friendly OLAPs can virtually eliminate Spreadsheet Hell. These products eliminate the need to re-create standard spreadsheet reports each period. They allow two reports, created



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by two different analysts, in two different corners of the world, to reconcile their reports easily. They virtually eliminate the need for spreadsheet databases. They make Excel users much more productive. Users don’t need to work long hours to crank out yet another version of a standard report. Instead, these products give analysts the time to think about their jobs, finding new ways to help their companies succeed. They give users reliable access to data that the IT department can’t provide any time soon. Do you want quick and easy access to the financial data for a new acquisition? Or to external data? Or to preliminary budgets? Do you want easy access to data in various databases that don’t talk to each other? The IT department typically can’t help you. But Excel-friendly OLAPs typically can.

The Disadvantages One disadvantage is the need for additional training. Although user training doesn’t take long, it is necessary. And someone, usually an Excel power user, needs to know how to update the database, maintain passwords, and perform other administrative functions. Another disadvantage is cost. Although Excel-friendly OLAP products tend to cost much less than Excel-surly products, the cost still tends to be outside the budgets of most small companies. Still another potential disadvantage is internal competition. That is, many companies already own an Excel-surly OLAP product. However, I know of several companies whose corporate headquarters purchased Excel-friendly OLAPs even though their divisions owned Excel-surly ones. In one such company, corporate analysts generate and distribute thousands of Excel reports each month from an Excel-friendly system, while their divisions with Excel-surly OLAPs still use those products.


Chapter 7. How to Use Spreadsheet Databases for Dashboard ReportingPage 83

Chapter 7. How to Use Spreadsheet Databases for Dashboard Reporting As the previous chapter discussed, poorly designed spreadsheet databases can have significant problems. Even so, certain techniques can reduce these problems significantly. Therefore, for companies with only one operating unit, a properly managed Excel database can serve as a reasonable substitute for an OLAP database, and therefore provide an allExcel solution. Figure 7-1 shows the general approach. You enter business data into an Excel database, which is carefully reconciled and checked for errors. And you password-protect this database to protect it from unauthorized changes. Many different Excel dashboards and other reports can report against this data. Typically, they do so using Excel’s INDEX function.

Figure 7-1. If an Excel workbook database is properly managed, it can provide small companies and divisions many of the benefits of an Excel-friendly OLAP.



How to Set Up the Excel Database The Excel database is a folder on your hard drive, a folder that contains one or more workbooks to be used as a spreadsheet database. For example, the folder for the sample database for this book contains these four workbooks: ActGL.xls, BudGL.xls, ActSales.xls, and FcstSales.xls. Each workbook typically contains several worksheets associated with time. For example, each workbook in the sample database contains three worksheets: Month, YTD, and R12. The Month sheet contains the monthly changes for each GL account. The YTD sheet contains year-to-date balances. And the R12 sheet contains the rolling 12month totals of the data in the Month worksheet. (You’ll learn more about the R12 sheet later in this chapter.) The most important thing to remember about these workbooks is that the sheets in each workbook must have the same structure. If the Month worksheet has data from January, 2001, through October, 2005, then the YTD and R12 worksheets must have the same months of data. Similarly, if the Month worksheet has 147 rows of data, with “Reconciliation Total” in the last row, then the other two sheets must be set up in the same way. Generally, it’s easy to set up this duplicate structure. Just complete the Month worksheet; copy the worksheet twice in your workbook; name the new tabs “YTD” and “R12”; then change the data as needed for the new sheets. Let’s take a look at each of the four workbooks in the database.



The ActGL.xls Workbook Figure 7-2 shows the four corners of the worksheet with the monthly Income Statement and the monthly changes in the Balance Sheet.

Figure 7-2. This figure shows the four corners of the Month worksheet in the ActGL.xls workbook. The data is surrounded by border rows and columns that anchor the range names.

The ActGL.xls workbook also contains worksheets named YTD and R12. All three sheets in the workbook have identical structures; they differ only by the data they contain. The gray rows and columns are very important in Figure 7-2, because all range names are anchored in these ranges. As you add new rows and columns of data, you always make sure that you insert the new rows and columns between the borders. Here are the names assigned to this workbook:

Name Each worksheet database contains rows of data described by specific GL accounts or product codes. A specific account or product code represents the Name of that item. This column contains that name.



Assign the name to the range that begins and ends with the border rows in the Name column. In Figure 7-2, this range is defined as: =Month!$B$3:$B$114. To assign this name and the adjacent names easily, select the range B3:D114 and choose Insert, Name, Create. In the Create Names dialog, ensure that only Top Row is checked.

Desc When you create reports, it’s often convenient to look up the description of the GL account number you use. This column allows you to do that. This column also labels the GL accounts to make them easier to work with when you build your reports. In Figure 7-2, the Desc range is defined as: =Month!$C$3:$C$114. Notice in the figure that I didn’t bother to enter Desc values for the labels in rows 111 and 112. You could enter such labels if you want to.

Sign The data in most General Ledgers is designed so that the sum of debits and credits equals zero. That is, debits are stored as positive numbers and credits are stored as negative numbers. You’ll find it useful to follow the same convention in the ActGL.xls workbook. If you follow this convention, however, you need an automatic way to convert the sign of your data when you create reports. The Sign column in Figure 7-2 achieves this purpose. Here, all accounts with a natural debit balance have a value of 1, and all accounts with a natural credit balance have a value of minus 1. You’ll soon see how we use this information in our reports. In Figure 7-2, the Sign range is defined as: =Month!$D$3:$D$114.



Date When you report data from this database, you’ll report by a specific month. This range contains that month number, formatted as shown. In Figure 7-2, the Date range is defined as: =Month!$E$2:$BB$2.

DataMonth The DataMonth range contains the actual monthly changes for each account balance in the General Ledger. Again, pay particular attention to the gray rows and columns that surround the actual data. These areas mark the boundaries of the data area. As you add rows or columns to your data, the range names will expand as needed if you insert your rows and columns between these shaded border ranges. In Figure 7-2, the DataMonth range is defined as: =Month!$E$3:$BB$114.

The DataYTD and DataR12 Ranges The ActGL.xls workbook contains three worksheets. Until now, all the range names discussed in this section have been defined in the worksheet named Month, a simplified version of which is shown in Figure 7-2. The names DataYTD and DataR12 are the only two names that will be defined for other worksheets in ActGL.xls. All three ranges for General Ledger data have the same cell references, each in its own worksheet. To illustrate, these are the three definitions for the actual ranges used in the next chapter to create a sample dashboard: DataMonth: =Month!$E$3:$BB$114 DataYTD: =YTD!$E$3:$BB$114 DataR12: ='R12'!$E$3:$BB$114



As you build your workbook database, make sure that all worksheets within each workbook have exactly the same structure, as illustrated by these three range names.

The BudGL.xls Workbook The BudGL.xls workbook differs in minor ways from the ActGL.xls workbook in Figure 7-2, but its general structure is the same. Here are the top- and bottom-left sections of the Month worksheet in this workbook:

Figure 7-3. This figure shows two sections from the worksheet database, which will contribute data to the dashboard report explained in Chapter 8.

The top section shows a variety of budgeted accounts from the General Ledger. The bottom section shows subtotals calculated from data in the top section. Here, the Name, Desc, and DataMonth ranges extend from row 3 through row 60.

Setting up the Data Notice that the data in Figure 7-3 begins in the year 2003, while the actual data in Figure 7-2 begins in 2001. There’s no need for one Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


workbook in the database to have the same number of periods as another. However, within the workbook, the data ranges do need to have a parallel structure. To illustrate, here are the data ranges for the three worksheets in the sample database: DataMonth: =Month!$D$3:$AC$60 DataYTD: =YTD!$D$3:$AC$60 DataR12: ='R12'!$D$3:$AC$60

Setting Up the Subtotals As a general rule, it’s useful to maintain common subtotals in your data worksheets, as shown in the bottom section of Figure 7-3. Doing so offers at least two benefits. One benefit is that these subtotals eliminate the need to calculate them within your reports. You simplify your reports if you can refer to the subtotals you need frequently. Another benefit is that they help you to improve the accuracy of your reports. You’ll be more accurate if you report a pre-calculated subtotal, rather than calculating it each time you use it. You’ll also be more accurate when you have pre-calculated numbers to which you can reconcile your detailed reports. The following formulas illustrate how the subtotals are calculated: Cell E57: Cell E58:

=SUM(E3:E6) =SUM(E6:E9)

Within the larger data area defined for the budgeted amounts, I’ve inserted additional rows to accommodate subtotals whose number of rows might change over time. I could have avoided the border rows if I had defined the subtotals like this:



Cell E57: Cell E58:

=E4+E5 =E7+E8

The first pair of formulas reflects the assumption that the number of accounts that define Sales and Cost of Sales will change frequently. The second pair reflects the assumption that the number probably won’t change frequently.

The ActSales.xls Workbook Figure 7-4 shows two sections from the workbook that tracks sales by product by month. Here, the products in rows 4 through 14 all belong to the Seating product line. The subtotal for the first month in this section appears in cell D54. The formula in cell D54 is merely: =SUM(D3:D15) In this particular example, the Name also is used as a description. If a more detailed description is needed, it could be added to this database. Figure 7-4. Cell D54 contains the subtotal of the products listed in the top seciton of the figure.



The FcstSales.xls Workbook There’s no need to show an example of the FcstSales.xls workbook, because it has the same general structure as shown in Figures 7-2 through 7-4. This workbook would contain its own range of time periods. The workbook with sales forecasts typically contains forecasted sales for each month in the coming year, the current year, and, perhaps, the prior year.

The Rolling-12 Worksheets All four workbooks include an R12 worksheet. Each column of data in these worksheets contains the 12 most-recent months of activity for every product or account. That is, each column in the R12 worksheets contains the sum of the current month and the eleven prior months. By doing so, these worksheets treat each month as the end of a fiscal year. This information is very useful, for at least two reasons. First, it provides the P&L totals that allow you to calculate financial ratios like Return On Equity or Assets Turnover for any month in a fiscal year. Second, because trends in these Rolling 12-month totals aren’t affected by seasonal variations, they provide a clearer view about the direction of your business. When you calculate rolling 12-month totals, you lose 11 degrees of freedom. To illustrate, if your data begins in January, 2002, the first total you can calculate will be for December, 2002. So what should you do about those first 11 columns of missing data?



You can’t delete them, because every worksheet in a database workbook must contain the same the same number of rows and columns as the other worksheets in that workbook. If you have additional years of performance history that aren’t in your database, you could use that data to calculate values for those first 11 columns. But if earlier data isn’t available, fill those first 11 columns with Excel’s =NA() function. That way, if you accidentally try to report the missing data, the NA results will alert you to the problem.

How to Manage Workbook Generations One of the problems with database workbooks is that they tend to multiply like rabbits. In fact, some people have dozens of generations of workbook databases saved on their hard drives. These multiple databases can become a significant problem, because it’s easy to lose track of which database is the correct one. Someone is bound to report against an incorrect version. There’s an easy way solve this problem. First, before you update your database, copy it to a new folder. (You might name the new folder using the date of the new data…something like “2005-07”, for July, 2005.) Then update the copy, not the original. This step brings two benefits. First, it allows other people to use the current version while you are working on the new version. Second, it protects the current version from mistakes you might make during your update process. After you’ve updated the database, make sure you test it for accuracy. Do the debits equal the credits? Have you reconciled everything that can be reconciled? Finally, after you’re certain that the updated workbooks are correct, copy them to the working directory, overwriting the previous version. You now have a current version and a backup; and people who use the database haven’t been bothered. Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].

Chapter 8. How to Build Dashboard Reports in Excel

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Chapter 8. How to Build Dashboard Reports in Excel Prior chapters have discussed the various elements needed to create a dashboard report: charting techniques, the Camera tool, funneling data to your figures, and so on. Now it’s time to bring all these elements together in an actual dashboard report.

The Structure of a Dashboard Workbook Dashboard workbooks aren’t designed like standard workbooks. Because they have unique requirements, they have a unique structure. Before I explain how to create a dashboard report, I should explain why it’s designed as it is.

The Importance of Scope Standard Excel reports and dashboard reports differ in one fundamental way: scope. Standard reports tend to have a narrow scope. They deal with one topic that’s reported on at least one page. Dashboard reports tend to have a wide scope. They can deal with many different topics, all of which are reported on one page. This distinction affects the design of your report workbook in one significant way: Dashboard reports of different topics are much easier to create and maintain if every figure—every chart and every table—is supported by its own worksheet in the report workbook. Occasionally, however, dashboard reports can contain many different figures about related topics. For example, dashboard figures could show sales for each of many products, variances for each of many accounts, spending for each of many departments, and so on. Here, where the instances vary only by the product or account numbers, the data could all be in the same worksheet.



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Most dashboards, however, have diverse topics. In this case, if your one-page dashboard report displays 30 charts and tables, your supporting workbook will contain at least 31 worksheets. It will have at least one sheet to support each figure and one sheet to contain the actual report. It may seem strange for someone to recommend that you create a workbook with many worksheets. As a general rule, workbooks with many sheets make navigation difficult. As a general rule, this is true. But in dashboard reports, using one sheet per figure brings two significant benefits: clarity and flexibility, as you will see.

Additional Worksheets In addition to the report page and the pages to support each figure, dashboard reports typically include at least two additional worksheets. One sheet that always is included is the Control sheet. Dashboard reports bring together a lot of content, often from many sources. It would be virtually impossible to re-use a dashboard report if there weren’t an easy way to control the reporting period and other key variables. That easy way is the Control sheet. To be clear, you try to design your dashboard report so that you never modify any sheet but the Control sheet, unless you want to change the structure of your report. From month to month, division to division, department to department—whatever—you change only the settings in your Control sheet. To the degree you enforce this rule, dashboards are easy to maintain. To the degree you ignore this rule, dashboards become a nightmare to support.



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An additional sheet that I often use is named TOC, for Table Of Contents. With a workbook that can have 20 to 30 sheets, it’s often difficult to find the right worksheet quickly. This worksheet maintains annotated links to the supporting worksheets. It also is a convenient place to add notes about the figures, including to-do items for pages. You never print the TOC worksheet for others. Instead, you use it to manage your dashboard workbook.

An Overview of the Report Page This figure shows the report that I’ll show you how to create in this chapter. It illustrates the four elements that are common to most dashboard reports: formatting, formulas, Camera objects, and charts.

Figure 8-1. The dashboard report explained in this chapter.

Formatting: To a large degree, formatting makes the difference between a dashboard report and an ordinary one with some charts



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and tables on it. To every degree possible, dashboard reports are “magazine-quality”. They look like they came from a magazine. Formulas: The date and the division name both are linked to the Control sheet. They change in the report in response to changes in the controlling data. Camera Objects: The figures for the P&L and the Balance Sheet are returned by Camera objects from supporting worksheets in the workbook. This strategy allows us to position the figures anywhere we want on the report page. Charts: Some charts reference the GL cube and others reference the Sales cube. Each dataset contains several years of history. The following sections lay out eight logical steps for creating an Excel dashboard report. These aren’t rigid, however. Once you’ve gained some experience in creating dashboards, you’ll probably find yourself moving back and forth among several steps as you create a new report. Even so, the following steps are useful because they lay out the tasks that you’ll need to accomplish, no matter what sequence you use.

Step 1: Create a Mockup Report Page You’ll save a lot of time if you start your report with a mockup. That way, you’ll have some idea of how many figures your report can hold, and what their size needs to be.

Initialize the Page Open a new workbook and then turn off the gridlines in Sheet1. To do so, choose Tools, Options. In the View tab of the Options dialog, uncheck Gridlines.



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Change the name of Sheet1 to Report. To do so, double-click on the text Sheet1 in the worksheet’s tab, and then enter Report. To get a rough idea of the size of the page you need to fill, mark the preliminary print area of your Report page. To do so, choose File, Print Preview. If your worksheet is new, Excel will launch an error dialog that says, “Microsoft Office Excel did not find anything to print.” Press the Esc key. Your worksheet now displays the boundaries of your default print area. This print area will be easier to manage if you define it formally. Select the default print area as it’s marked in your spreadsheet, and choose File, Print Area, Set Print Area. When you do so, Excel assigns the name Print_Area to the print area. You can modify it by changing the definition of Print_Area or by selecting a new area and choosing File, Print Area, Set Print Area. Usually, your report will be easier to design if you set up the left and right columns of your print area with narrow borders. Therefore, set the width of these columns to 1. To insert another column in your print area, choose an entire column within the area by clicking on its column header. Hold down the Ctrl key and press the + (plus) key. To remove a selected column, hold down the Ctrl key and press the – (minus) key. As you create your mockup, you probably will add and delete columns several times. To see what your current report actually looks like use the Print Preview command.



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Create and Position Your Mockup Figures Figure 8-2 shows the mockup that I created. Ultimately, the small areas in this figure will contain charts; the large area will contain a Camera object; and the other area is undefined for now.

Figure 8-2. This mockup of the dashboard report provides a rough idea about the desired size and shape of charts and other displays.

Begin a New Report To begin this display, enter a place-holder title in cell B1. Enter a place-holder date in the top-right cell inside the narrow border. In Figure 8-2, this is cell I1. But your worksheet might use a different cell. Right-align that cell. To give yourself an idea of what the report will look like, it’s usually a good idea to format the fonts in these cells somewhat as they will appear in your final report. You will change the format in the next step, but by having titles somewhat as shown, your report already starts to look and feel like a dashboard. Create the first textbox, and anchor it in cell B3. To anchor it, click and drag it with your mouse and then press down your Alt key while Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


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your are dragging the image. This will cause the textbox to jump to the top-left corner of the current cell as you drag the textbox object. After you position the text box, your worksheet will look something like Figure 8-3.

Figure 8-3. The first few elements of the mockup of the dashboard report.

Adjust the Text Box Properties In the next few steps you’ll sometimes want the text box to expand and contract as you adjust rows and columns. At other times you’ll want the text box to ignore these adjustments to your worksheet. To specify how the textbox responds when you adjust rows and columns, you use the Format Text Box dialog. However, Excel provides two versions of this dialog. One allows you to adjust its internal properties, the other its external properties. If you right-click within the textbox, you’ll see the border shown for the top figure here. When you choose Format Text Box from this right-click menu, you can adjust only the font. But if you right-click on the edge of the textbox, you’ll see the border shown for the bottom figure. Then, when you choose Format Text Box from that right-click menu, you can adjust the textbox properties.



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The Properties tab of the Format Text Box dialog offers three choices. “Move and size with cells”, “Move but don’t size with cells”, and, “Don’t move or size with cells.” As you create your dashboard, you’ll adjust these options frequently.

Set Up the Rows and Columns When you compare figures 8-2 and 8-3 you’ll see two major differences. Figure 8-2 has more figures, of course. But more important, it uses its rows and columns to control the figures. This corner from figure 8-2 illustrates the approach. Here, I plan for cell B3 to contain the title of the chart, cell B4 to control its height, and cell B5 to contain the unit of measure for the Y-axis. To set up this area, first set the widths of columns B, D, and F to about 17 pixels. To do so, first select column B by clicking on its column header. Hold down the Ctrl key and then select columns D and F. Then set the width of these columns to 17. Similarly, set the widths of columns C, E, and G to 1. Also set the height of rows 4 and 8 to 65 pixels. You’ll adjust both heights and widths later, but these will put you in the ball park.

Position the Textbox in its Cells Anchor the top-left corner of the textbox in the top-left corner of cell B3. To do so, click and drag the textbox approximately into position. As you do so, hold down the Alt key. This will cause the textbox to jump to the top-left corner of each cell it comes near. Similarly, to position the bottom-right corner, click and drag that corner while you hold down the Alt key. Then set the property of this textbox to “Move and size with cells.”



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Complete the Mockup The rest of the mockup is easy.

To copy the first textbox to the top row of textboxes in columns D and F, select the range B3:B5 and copy it to cells D3 and F3. To copy the top row of textboxes to the second row, copy the range B3:F5 to cell B7. With the chart textboxes in place, you now can enter title text in each, as shown in the figure above. Finally, to complete the mockup, widen column H as shown and delete several columns so that column J becomes the narrow column at the right of your display. Then enter the textbox shown here and the “whatever” textbox shown in Figure 8-2.

An Alternate Method: Use Cell Borders If you have a good idea about what you want your dashboard to look like, you might find it easier to use cell borders rather than textboxes to define your mockup figures. The above figure, for example, would look the same if I had used cell borders. However, if you aren’t sure what your report will look like when you begin, using text boxes probably is the most flexible approach.



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Step 2: Determine Your Dashboard Design Your mockup provides a general idea of what information you want your dashboard to contain. In this step, you determine what you want your dashboard to look like. You determine its fonts, colors, and other graphic elements. This can be a difficult task for most Excel users, few of whom are graphic artists. That’s why the Internet and business magazines are so useful. They provide many sample designs that you can adapt for your dashboards. To illustrate, when I searched the web for sample charts and tables, I eventually found this figure from Business Week. I used Microsoft PhotoDraw to find the RGB values for each of the colors. Because Microsoft no longer makes that product, you will need to use another drawing program if you don’t have PhotoDraw already. The key feature you will need is what PhotoDraw calls an eyedropper tool. When you hover the tool over any object on your screen it assigns the object’s color to the selected drawing object in PhotoDraw. I set up these colors in Excel using the technique I describe in the Appendix, How to Set Any Color. Then I applied those colors and a similar font for the title to the mockup.



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Format the Mockup You can format your report any time you want. But I like to format it early in the process because it helps me to better visualize how each figure will look in the final report. This helps me to get each figure right the first time, saving rework. The first step is to set up the colors to use in your display. The Appendix explains the general approach. This figure shows the seven specific RGB (Red, Green, Blue) values that I assigned in the Color tab of Excel’s Tools, Options dialog. To illustrate the notation, the first color I changed has a value of Red:236, Green:231, and Blue:189. The figure below shows how I used these colors to format the top of the mockup report. I expected to make some changes to the report as it developed, of course. But this initial format definitely was in the ballpark.

To fit the report title as shown, I merged the range B1:G2. To do so, select the range; choose Format, Cells; in the Alignment tab Merge Cells; then choose OK.



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Step 3: Add the Control Sheet and the First Data Sheet So far, your dashboard workbook contains only the Report sheet, which is a mockup. Before you can add a real figure to your report, you first need to add a data sheet and the Control sheet. The data sheet contains the data that supports your first figure. The Control sheet contains values and settings that apply to your entire workbook. You’ll spend some time creating these two sheets and your first figure, described in the next step. Once these items work correctly, you will use these items as patterns to complete your report.

The Control Sheet Figure 8-4 shows the Control sheet used for the dashboard. Although these lists of items seem extensive, they are easy to create.

Figure 8-4. This Control sheet contains a variety of settings and values used by the dashboard.



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All labels with a white background in column A are names of cells assigned to adjacent cells in column B. To name the bottom section, for example, select the range A8:B18 and choose Insert, Name, Create. In the Create Names dialog, ensure that only Left Column is checked, and then choose OK.

Control Constants. I use this section to specify constants that could change, but seldom do. In addition to Currency, I’ll often include the name of the company, or the names of managers whose names appear in reports designed especially for them.

Variables. This section contains values that you can change to specify the information you want to report. Cell B5 contains a date value.

Reserved Names. The data sheets use a variety of names that are local to each worksheet, rather than global. This list contains the global version of each such name. By defining the global names here, we help to ensure that we won’t accidentally assign a global name to one of the data sheets, which could cause the Report sheet to display the wrong data in a figure. When you start a new dashboard, this list will be empty. As you add names to your data sheets, you define their names in this list before you define their names in a data sheet.

Scale Factor. The dashboard charts don’t have enough room to display large numbers with all their zeros. Instead, we need to display a value like $12,345,678.90 as 12.3, and then provide a unit of measure of Millions of $. As you’ll see, this table provides tools to help achieve this goal. To define the range names for this section, select D2:F7; choose Insert, Names, Create; ensure that only Top Row is checked; then choose OK.



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The First Data Sheet for Charts Typically, your first data sheet will be for a chart. Every chart in your dashboard report will use a data sheet that looks something like this, except that columns E through N will be visible. This data sheet contains four categories of data.

Labels & Controls The text in Cell B1 will be the title of the first chart.

Figure 8-5. This sheet provides the data for the first chart. Similar sheets provide data for the other charts. Columns E-N are hidden for this figure only.

The section in rows 3-5 help you to scale down values in your charts. This step is necessary because our small charts need all the horizontal space they can get. Using long Y-axis labels wastes space. Enter a number in cell B3 to specify the scale type to use from the Control sheet. The formula in cell B4 returns the label from the Control sheet based on the scale type you enter: B4:

=INDEX(ScaleLabel, ScaleType)&" of "&Currency

The formula in cell B5 returns the Scale value that will be used in the Chart Data section: B5:

=INDEX(ScaleMultiplier,ScaleType)



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Dates The row of dates in row 7 determines which columns of data are displayed by the remaining formulas in Figure 8-5. P7: =CurMonth Contains the date value for the current month. It gets its data from the CurMonth range in the Control sheet, where you specify the current month to report. (See Figure 8-4.) O7: =DATE(YEAR(P7),MONTH(P7)-1,1) Returns the date value one month earlier. Copy cell O7 to the left as needed.

Raw Data This section of Figure 8-5 contains formulas that return data from your source files. Column Index Numbers, Actual The formulas in row 10 in Figure 8-5 return the column index numbers associated with each date. Here are key formulas for this section: P10: =MATCH(CurMonth,ActGL.xls!Date,0) Finds the current month in the ActGL.xls database, and returns its column index number. O10: =P10-1 Returns the index number for the preceding month. Copy cell O10 to the left as needed. Row Numbers Cell B11 in Figure 8-5 returns the row index number used by the formulas in row 11:



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B11: =MATCH(A11,ActGL.xls!Name,0) If the Name range in the ActGL.xls worksheet doesn’t contain the text found in cell A11, this formula returns #N/A. On the other hand, if the Name range contains more than one cell with the text found in cell A11, this formula returns the first instance found. Therefore, you need to ensure that there are no duplicate names in the Name range of your data workbooks. The Sign Value Cell C11 in Figure 8-5 returns the value for the default sign for the account in the General Ledger. Accounts with a normal debit balance have a Sign of 1; accounts with a normal credit balance have a Sign of -1. Here’s the formula for the cell shown, which returns this value from the database: C11: =INDEX(ActGL.xls!Sign,B11) The Data Value Now that our worksheet contains the key values needed, we can enter a formula that returns the value for the specified account in the specified month: D11: =INDEX(ActGL.xls!DataMonth,$B11,D$10)*$C11 Here, the INDEX function returns data from the DataMonth range, from the row specified by cell B11 and the column specified by cell D10. This value is multiplied by the Sign value fund in cell C11. Copy this formula to the right, as needed.



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Entering Raw Data from Other Worksheets Once you create formulas that return data from one worksheet in your database, you can copy and modify them to return data from other worksheets. In Figure 8-5, for example, here are the key formulas that return data from the Month worksheet in BudGL.xls workbook: P13: =MATCH(CurMonth,BudGL.xls!Date,0) B14: =MATCH(A14,BudGL.xls!Name,0) D14: =INDEX(BudGL.xls!DataMonth,$B14,D$13) Similarly, if you needed year-to-date budget data to be in row 14, you would use this formula for the cell shown: D14: =INDEX(BudGL.xls!DataYTD,$B14,D$13) In all cases, of course, you would copy the formulas to adjacent cells as needed.

Chart Data This section of Figure 8-5 contains the data used by the chart, which will be discussed in the next step. Notice in Figure 8-5 that I’ve left extra rows between the Raw Data and the Chart Data sections. This is because it’s a good idea to start each section in the same row of every data sheet for every chart, and because several other charts will need that extra space to calculate their results. By enforcing a consistent structure, you make it easy to change all chart sheets in one operation. Row 23 contains dates as they will be displayed in the chart. This row contains two types of formulas:



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D23: =MONTH(D$7)&CHAR(13)&RIGHT(YEAR(D$7),2) Displays the month number, a carriage return, and then the year number as two characters. Copy this formula to cell P23. O23: =MONTH(O$7) Displays only the month number. Copy this formula to the range E23:N23. Rows 24 and 25 contain formulas that return raw data, scaled as specified by the scale type. D24: =D$12*Scale Copy this formula to the range D24:P25. Assign the labels in column C of the Chart Data area as names for the data to be charted. (Be sure that you’ve already entered these labels in the Reserved Names section of the Control sheet, and created those global names.) To assign the names in this worksheet, select the range C23:P25. Choose Insert, Name, Create. In the Create Names dialog, ensure that only the Left Column is checked. Then choose OK. To complete this step, name the data sheet “A”, without the quotes. You’ll name the next data sheet B, and then C, and so on. Using short worksheet names like this brings two benefits. First, you’ll be able to see as many tabs as possible in your workbook, which makes them easier to find. Second, you’ll find it easier to set up the dashboard in the first place.



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Step 4: Create the First Mini-Chart Figure. Chapter 2 described how to create a mini-chart. Chapter 3 described ways to format charts. Chapter 4 described how to create a worksheet figure that uses the mini-chart object. In this step, we apply those techniques. This figure shows the first dashboard chart in the dashboard worksheet. The chart object is anchored in cells B4 and B6. The line in this chart has the formula: =SERIES(,A!Month,A!Actual,1) And the area chart type has the formula: =SERIES(,A!Month,A!Budget,2) Two cells in this figure contain formulas. B4: =A!FigTitle Returns the title for the figure, as shown in cell B1 of Figure 8-5. The cell is centered, and its font is Arial 8-point bold. B6: =A!UnitsLabel Returns the units label for the figure, as shown in cell B4 of Figure 8-5. The font is 6-point Arial. After you first anchor the chart in the range, you probably will need to adjust the Plot Area within the Chart Area. Click and drag the left side of the Plot Area as far as possible to the left. Then drag the right side of the Plot Area as far as possible to the right. Drag the top of the Plot Area so that it’s slightly below the title. Drag the bottom of the Plot Area so that its X-axis labels are above the units label in row 6.



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Take care when you adjust the Plot Area within the Chart Area, because all your other charts of this type will use the same positioning.

Step 5: Set Up Data for Other Charts. To set up the data for the other charts, copy the first data sheet, sheet A. Name these new sheets B, C, D, etc. Then change their data and formulas as needed to display the other data. To illustrate, the FigTitle for sheet B (shown in column D) would be Gross Margin. The ScaleType would be 5. The UnitsLabel would have a formula of… =INDEX(ScaleLabel,ScaleType) …and it would return “Percent” as shown. You might find it easier to set up sheet B, and its chart; then set up sheet C, and its chart; and so on. Either method works.

Step 6: Set Up the Other Chart Figures. To set up the second chart figure, copy the range B4:B6 to cell D4, as shown in the figure above. This action will copy both formulas and the chart. Then connect the formulas and the chart to the data sheet for the second chart. Connecting the formulas is easy to do. You merely change a formula like =A!FigTitle to =B!FigTitle. And you change SERIES formulas from something like =SERIES(,A!Month,A!Actual,1) to =SERIES(,B!Month,B!Actual,1).



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Step 7: Set Up the Other Figures. The dashboard report, Figure 8-1, includes three additional figures, an Income Statement, a Balance Sheet, and a Legend.

Create the Balance Sheet Figure 8-6 shows the top of the data sheet for the dashboard’s Balance Sheet. The FigTitle cell isn’t used, nor is the UnitsLabel. The Scale value is used to scale the data. Figure 8-6. The top of the worksheet that contains the Balance Sheet. The Income Statement worksheet uses a similar design.

The labels in column B are the names for the summary accounts in the data sheet. And the labels in column F typically use the same descriptions, returned by formula. The indents in cells E15 and E16 are set by the Indent setting in the Alignment tab of the Format Cells dialog box.

As Chapter 7 explains, Column C contains a formula that returns each account’s row number, and column D returns each account’s Sign. Accounts with a natural debit balance have a sign of +1 and accounts with a natural credit balance have a sign of -1.



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The account balances in column G of Figure 8-6 use a formula like this: G9:

=INDEX(ActGL.xls!DataYTD,$C9,MonthIndex)*$D9*Scale

The Scale value and the cell references are shown in Figure 8-6. To display the Balance Sheet in the Report sheet, select the shaded Balance Sheet area, click on the Camera tool, and click anywhere on the Report worksheet. Doing so will paste a Camera object of the Balance Sheet. Then position the balance sheet within the Report. Chapter 6 explains the Camera tool in detail.

Create the Income Statement

Figure 8-7. The top of the worksheet that contains the income statement.

The formulas and procedure for creating the Income Statement are virtually identical to that of the Balance Sheet.



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Create the Legend This figure shows the legend in its data sheet. Cell B2 contains the text, “Legend”. To center the text as shown, choose Format, Cells. In the Alignment tab of the Format Cells dialog, choose Center Across Selection in the Horizontal dropdown box. Column E contains the text shown. The range C4:C6 contains simple drawing objects. The formula in cell B8 returns the units label specified for the Balance Sheet. Its formula is simply: ="Data in "&J!UnitsLabel As in row 2, format the range B8:F8 as Center Across Selection.

Color-Code the Sheet Tabs At this point, your workbook has a good number of data sheets. Some support charts, some support tables, and others support miscellaneous figures like the Legend. This often makes it difficult to find the data sheet that you want. One way to deal with this issue is to create a Table of Contents sheet, which contains descriptive links to each page. An additional way to deal with this issue is to color-code your worksheet tabs. That is, make the tabs for your chart data sheets one color, the tabs for your tables another color, and so on. To specify a tab color, merely right-click the tab, choose Tab Color, and then choose the color you want from the Format Tab Color dialog box.



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Step 8: Make It All Fit. When you compare Figures 8-1 and 8-2 you’ll see that I had to change my Report sheet as I moved from the mockup to the final design. This is because the financial statements took up more space than I had estimated and I had forgotten the Legend entirely. This is a common problem. Your figures seldom fit exactly as planned. Or your mockup might overlook a critical figure that must be added to your report. Or when your boss sees the “final” version, he immediately asks for changes. Or whatever. In other words, it’s a good idea to know how to adjust your figures to make them fit in the room available.

Create a Parking Place After you set up a chart figure you’ll often need to move it within the display. This often means that you must park one or more figures out of the way so you can move another figure into position. The easiest way to do this is to copy several spreadsheet rows that contain one row of figures, and then paste them Figure 8-8. Rows 17-19, which are below the below your display. When actual dashboard, have been set up to "park" chart figures so they can be repositioned. you copy the entire rows, Excel sets the height of the target rows to the height of the source rows. Then you delete the copied chart objects. Here, for example, I copied rows 12 through 14 to cell A17, and then I deleted the copied charts to create a parking place. Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


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Suppose you want to interchange the figures in columns B and D. You would copy the range B12:B14 to cell D17 (which also copies the chart), delete the chart shown in column B, copy the range D12:D14 to cell B12, delete the chart in the range D12:D14, and then copy the range D17:D19 to D12.

Expand or Contract the Figures When you first create your charts and tables, you only can estimate their final size. Not until all the other figures are in place can you really see which figures need more space, and which figures can use less space. Therefore, you’ll typically need to expand and contract the figures to make them fit on the page. Before you expand or contract figures, you need to ensure that their properties are set correctly. Specifically, your charts must be set so they move and size with cells, but the Camera objects must be set so they only move with cells. To set up the chart objects, first select them all. To do this, select one chart object, hold down your Shift key, and then click on each of the other chart objects. To adjust the charts, right-click on any selected chart; choose Format Object; then, in the Properties tab, choose “Move and size with cells.” To set up the Camera figures, select them all as you selected the chart objects. In the Properties tab of the Format Picture dialog, choose “Move but don’t size with cells.” Now, to adjust the width of the charts, select each of the main chart columns (columns B and D in Figure 8-8), and then set the same new width for each chart in one operation. To adjust the rows, select each main chart row and set the row heights in one operation. To adjust the Camera figures, you don’t adjust the camera objects; doing so merely stretches or shrinks them. Instead, adjust the rows Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


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and columns in the ranges that the Camera objects reference. As you adjust those rows and columns, the Camera object will expand or contract as appropriate.

Set Up Alternate Figures One of the benefits of using Excel for dashboard reporting is that you can quickly change the report. However it’s not unusual to try certain changes and then decide that the original version was the best version after all. Therefore, when you make changes to a dashboard report, it’s a good idea to plan for those changes to be reversed. Most Excel users protect themselves in this regard by saving multiple generations of their reports. Then, if changes need to be reversed, they can revert to an earlier generation. But this technique often won’t work with dashboards, because many different figures can be changed or restored. Therefore, no earlier generation has just the combination of figures you really need.

A More Flexible Way to Plan for Undoing Changes The most frequent type of change is to replace a particular chart or table with a different figure. What takes the time is to create the data sheet to support that new figure. It takes just a few seconds to point a figure to that new data. Therefore, it’s often a good idea to leave recently removed data sheets in your report workbook for a short time, just in case your boss wants to undo some of the changes she’s requested for her dashboard report. However, it’s also a good idea to remove data sheets that probably won’t be used any time soon. Otherwise, your workbook grows bigger and slower with each new change.



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How to Update Your Report Each Period This chapter has discussed many details about how to create a dashboard report. So briefly, let’s back up from the details and see where we are… Our goal has been to create dashboards and other reports that we can update easily and that are easy to read. This is what we’ve done. Each period, you update your Excel database with new data, and then you check it for errors. When the data is ready to report, you open your first report, enter the new date, recalculate, and print. Then you open the next report that uses your data; you enter the new date, recalculate, and print. You do the same for the next report, and the next. It’s that easy.


Chapter 9. Magazine-Quality Dashboard Designs

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Chapter 9. Magazine-Quality Dashboard Designs More than fifteen years ago I realized that Excel could produce magazine-quality reports. Since that time, I’ve occasionally clipped figures from magazines and copied figures from their web sites, figures that could help me to produce such reports in Excel. This chapter presents a variety of these figures, with comments about how you can adapt them to Excel.

Online Business Week Figures During the past 20 years, Business Week consistently has produced the most interesting and useful business graphics for Excel users. The following charts and tables are from that magazine’s web site. The Excel example below is a quick-and-dirty imitation of the figure at the right. The titles are in spreadsheet cells. All chart formatting has been hidden. To allow for changing data, the other text in the original would go above or below the chart.



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Put the title in a cell with a white font and a blue background. The remainder of the chart would be in a second cell, with the orange background. All three labels in the Plot Area could be in text boxes on top of the chart. Put the line labels in a fixed position in the top-left area of the chart, not near their lines as shown here. Their colors would link the label to the line.

Excel can’t produce the thick lines shown here. And the chart titles probably should be placed somewhere outside the plot area. Otherwise, Excel can closely match this figure.



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The top figure is from Business Week; the bottom figure is from Excel. The Excel figure uses five charts, all scaled from 0 to 35 percent. Four of the charts show no axes information, only the data. The fifth shows only the axes information and gridlines, but no data. The four charts are on top of the fifth. Cells in the worksheet contain the names of each company. In Excel, it’s easy to set up bold formatting like this for the chart’s title. But use it sparingly. By overdoing it, your audience begins to feel that you’re yelling at them.



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This figure resembles a dashboard report. (Note that the figure’s labels are difficult to read because I reduced the figure to fit it on this page.) Because the charts are transparent we see the color of the cells on which they’re placed. The labels above the plot areas leave no question about what measure each chart reports. Again, these lines are slightly thicker than Excel can produce. But Excel’s thickest lines would work here. The table would be a Camera object, which points to another worksheet in the dashboard’s workbook.



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Here’s a way to grab attention. Each chart includes a short explanation. The numbers under each column chart could be in spreadsheet cells, formatted as shown. The legend in the bottom right chart could be six text boxes. Three of these would be square and filled with the line colors used in the chart.

This probably is a little too cute for a business report. And it takes up more space on a page than the charts would by themselves. On the other hand, occasionally adding relevant images like these to your displays could grab attention and relieve the boredom of standard reports. Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


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This figure should look rather ordinary by now. Its table is a Camera object that displays a range from another sheet in the workbook. And its colors are specified in the Color tab of the Tools, Options dialog. The label in the chart uses a transparent textbox.

Here are six charts in the space often used for one. The Excel mockup at right matches them fairly closely. The only way to put the two charts so close together is to use the Camera tool to return only the visible areas from the charts, not the empty spaces that surround them.



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Other Online Sources Looking online, I’ve found very few chart and table ideas from publications other than Business Week. The most interesting ones I’ve found are shown in these two pages. If you come across sites with interesting charts and tables, please send their links to [email protected].

This table is from RedHerring.com. For a magazine, this is a rather ordinary table. But for Excel, it’s quite goodlooking. In Excel, the text probably would start in column C. Columns A and B would contain the cell patterns shown here. Similarly, the right side of the figure would end with two columns with similar cell patterns.



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These charts from Economist.com illustrate the use of a consistent style, which you might find useful. Here, charts use minimal formatting, with only the red mark and the blue figure number used to add frosting to the figures. Both items could be text boxes. Excel charts like the top one typically are difficult to automate or update easily. This is because data points often tend to clump in the bottom left corner of your chart area. This causes all the labels to overlap and become unreadable. The bottom figure would be easier to automate than the top figure. Put the two labels in text boxes and position the labels in the bottom left corner of the chart. Finally, assign the line colors to the labels in the text boxes, so that the labels can serve as legends.



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Figures Clipped from Magazines & Newspapers The figures that follow are scanned images from a variety of publications. I credit the source if I know it. Because these images are scanned, they’re not as sharp as those in the previous section. Even so, they serve as useful examples.

(Fortune Magazine, 1992) Use textboxes to create the titles above each chart. The textboxes would be on top of the charts, covering the part that you don’t want to display. Similarly, textboxes at the bottom cover the bottom of the charts. The blue and red section titles, combined with the background colors, differentiate the two categories of information. The easiest way to assign the background colors would be to use cell patterns, combined with a transparent Chart Area. The Chart Area is transparent so it can extend into the narrow columns to the right of each figure, which causes the chart to be displayed flush right. The legend information in the top left corner of each chart would come from textboxes or Camera objects (try both) linked to cells. This allows the text to update automatically as the data changes each period Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Kyd. All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without express written permission from the author. [email protected].


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(Forbes) Here’s a simple Excel table with a bar chart on top of it. To size the bars to the rows, select the data series, choose Format Data Series. In the Options tab, adjust the Gap Width as needed. Don’t overlook the table formatting, which gives the figure a professional appearance. The title, black bar, gray header area, and so on turn an ordinary figure into a professional display.

(Fortune) Here’s one way to set up more detailed legends. For standard reporting, the red and green arrows would be difficult to maintain. But because of the color coding, they’re not needed. The title could be in a cell or a textbox.



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This is from an environmental ad. All titles would be in text boxes. Titles that need to change automatically would be linked to spreadsheet cells. To set this up, select the textbox, click in the formula bar, then click on the cell that contains the text you want to use. The brown and blue background would be bitmaps copied to the spreadsheet. The chart is a simple one with most of the formatting removed. Rather than labeling the Y axis as shown, try putting a label like this in a textbox below the date labels: ▲ Thousand BTU per 1982 Dollar

You could duplicate this table exactly in Excel. Set the new colors in the Color tab after choosing Tools, Options.



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Rather than countries in this figure, think of divisions, products, or sales regions. Where a map doesn’t apply, insert a chart that compares the different entities, using their dominant colors as the legend. Notice the tables to the right of each pair of charts. You could set these up easily in a worksheet, then use the Camera tool to display them.

(Seattle Times) The arrows at the bottom are traffic lights, as discussed in Chapter 5. For monthly use, you would need to maintain the two callouts manually. So, don’t use them. Instead, add this information in a line of text, or a small table, below the chart. For clarity, display the X-axis labels in thousands, changing the figure’s subtitle to “thousand metric tons.”



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This Excel display uses a format that resembles figures from the Wall Street Journal during the early 1990s. The legends are drawing objects, not chart objects. D

E

F

G

H

I

Employment Trends

J

M

Recent Months

1.5 Million Workers

L

Seattle-Bellevue-Everett

Past 12 Years

1.0

8%

1.45

7.5%

6%

1.40

7.0%

4% 0.5 0.0

1.35

6.5%

1.30

6.0%

2%

1.25

0%

1.20 2002

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 Unemployed

K

Employed

5.5%

Unemployment Rate

C 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

2003

Unemployment Rate

(Fortune, 2005) The page above made me wonder how small Excel charts could be. Quite small, it turns out, as this Excel version demonstrates.



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(Fortune) The left figure shows the holes from my three-ring binder. The right figure is an Excel mockup I created more than ten years ago. The labels at the left of my version are textboxes, with their fonts rotated. (Excel 2003 can’t rotate the textboxes themselves.) I matched the color of the textbox with the color of the line. In the original, the colored text in the chart area typically served both as a chart title and as a legend.



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Full-Page Magazine Displays Ultimately, dashboard displays are full-page displays. This section provides samples from various business magazines. You’ve probably seen many of these displays before. But now, think of them as Excel displays. For example, this Business Week display consists of charts, textboxes, and Camera objects.



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(Forbes, 2001) Don’t try to copy displays like this exactly, even when you can do so in Excel. Instead, use the ideas they offer to create your own magazine-quality dashboards.



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(Forbes, 2000) One reason that Excel is so useful for dashboard reporting is that Excel users can change the reports so easily. These changes always are necessary, because what was important last month may not be important this month. To illustrate, this version of Markets and Forecasts is quite different from the one on the previous page, which was printed only eight months after this one.



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(Business Week, 1992) Dashboards typically are rich in charts. Their purpose, however, is to present summarized information in few pages. When tables can do this better than charts, use tables. This figure, for example, uses many more tables than charts. But like other dashboards, it summarizes many useful facts on one page.



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(Business Week, 1992) This is one of the first displays that I adapted to Excel. It presents a lot of information on one page, and it’s easy to read. You’ll find my own version on the following page.



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Full-Page Excel Dashboards This e-book has a large file size because of the many bitmaps it contains. To keep the file from being very large, I’ve kept these bitmaps small…which makes them slightly fuzzy. Even so, they illustrate the techniques used to create them. This dashboard is a mockup that imitates the Business Week figure on the previous page.



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You can see from the row and column headers that most of the text in this figure resides in cells in the worksheet. The two tables are Camera objects that point to other pages. Each chart, of course, points to data on a different page. And notice how the sets of row and column headers repeat exactly for each row and column of chart figures.



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The list in the bottom left is returned by a variable-height Camera object, as described on page 58. Static Camera objects return the other two tables. The charts on this page show virtually the same information as the dashboard on the previous page. But the “look” of the page is completely different. That is, Excel gives you the ability to create reports with virtually any appearance you want.



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This page charts the performance of about a dozen competitors, and details the performance of five. (“Our” company has the red cell pattern in row 18; “our” competitors have the black patterns.) With the exception of the chart and the section titles, all content on this page is returned by Camera objects. Notice that the row and column settings serve little part in this display, because the Camera objects ignore them.



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The tables reside in this report; they’re not on separate worksheets returned by a Camera object. This is possible to do because the data is displayed consistently for each column in the report. This general format has a lot of flexibility. I’ve created similar reports with 12 months of data in the tables and with as few as two charts and as many as five.



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This is a classic example of the power of the Camera tool. The columns for the two white tables at the left don’t match up with each other, or with the buff-colored table at the bottom. And the columns in the white tables at the right don’t match the columns beneath them.


Appendix

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Appendix Display any Colors in Excel (Adapted from ExcelUser.com) Excel offers a default palate of only 56 colors. For most people, most of the time, these are the only colors available within Excel. However, Excel users have much more power over the color of their reports than the default palate implies. Although it's true that you can use only 56 colors in one workbook, you can use any 56 colors you want. This fact gives you tremendous power to create reports with virtually any appearance. Not only can your Excel reports use the colors from your company's letterhead, but you can set up colors that make your reports more interesting and easier to understand. To illustrate, this figure is an Excel report of public data from 2001 for Exxon Mobil Corp. This probably looks like no Excel report you've ever seen before reading this book. One reason this doesn't look like an Excel report is that it uses colors that Excel doesn't use...at least not by default. Instead, it uses the colors found in the bitmap at the top of every page at ExcelUser.com. Your color assignments are stored with Excel's workbook file. Therefore, you could maintain many different Excel templates, each with its own palate of colors.


Appendix

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The figure at the right shows the palate from an Excel template that I used to create the report shown above. These colors are based on the Paper template offered by Microsoft PhotoDraw. This excellent drawing program was included with Microsoft Office for several years, but the product was killed after Office 2000. The colors in PhotoDraw's Paper palate are in the second row. The other colors in the first five rows are variations on the Paper theme. The last two rows of colors in this palate provide a variety of other useful colors. As with the standard color settings, we typically use the dark colors for lines in cell borders, charts, and drawing objects, and the light colors to shade the backgrounds of those objects. You could use nearly an infinite variety of colors in your own reports. For example, this figure shows the other palates that came with PhotoDraw. You could, of course, use any palate you want.

Setting Up Your Own Colors It's easy to set up a new color in Excel. However, depending on what you’re trying to achieve, this process can be time-consuming. To set up your own colors, first open a workbook in which you want to save the color assignments. Choose Tools, Options. Select the Color tab. In the palate provided, select a color that you want to


Appendix

Page 147

change. Then click on the Modify button to launch the Colors dialog. In the Standard tab you can choose from many colors that have been set up for you. Or, in the Custom tab, shown here, you can specify any color you wish. To choose a color, click on the color with your mouse pointer. The plus-shaped marker shows where you click. You can lighten or darken your selection by sliding the pointer at the right as needed. If you want to specify a color exactly, you can enter its RGB (Red, Green, Blue) color value in this dialog. Often, you won't know the RGB value, but you will be able to display an object that has the color you want. In this case, you can use PhotoDraw or many other drawing programs to help you. They have tools that return the RGB color code for any object that you can touch with your mouse. Repeat the process until you have assigned the colors you want. When you are through, save the workbook as a normal Excel workbook. Or, to save your workbook as an Excel template, choose File, Save As. Enter the file name that you want. Then, in the Save As Type dropdown list box, choose "Template (*.xlt)", and choose OK.


Appendix

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Additional Dashboard Resources ExcelUser.com My web site, http://www.ExcelUser.com/, offers a variety of additional resources to help you create and improve your Excel dashboards: •

Completed dashboard and data workbooks, which you can adapt to your own company’s dashboards.

•

Workbooks with a variety of color palettes.

•

Articles and other solutions directly or indirectly related to Excel dashboards.

•

Etc.

Books by Edward Tuft Edward Tufte is the leading authority on the visual display of quantitative information. You can learn more about his books and lectures at: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/


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Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails

Practical Data Analysis and Reporting with BIRT

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Principles of Finance with Excel: Includes CD

Mastering Excel 2003 Programming with VBA

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Mastering Excel 2003: programming with VBA

Accessing and Analyzing Data With Microsoft Excel

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Mastering Excel 2003: programming with VBA

Mastering Excel 2003 Programming with VBA

Building financial models with Microsoft Excel

Mastering Excel 2003 Programming with VBA

Financial Modeling for Managers: With Excel Applications

Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA (Excel Power Programming With Vba)

Principles of Finance with Excel: Includes CD

Financial Analysis with Microsoft Excel 2002

Formulas and Functions with Microsoft Excel 2003

Dashboard Reporting With Excel

Financial Analysis With Excel

Statistical Analysis With Excel

Analyzing Business Data with Excel

Excel Programming with VBA Starter

Excel Programming with VBA Starter

Financial Analysis with Microsoft Excel

Intermediate Microeconomics with Microsoft Excel

Analyzing Business Data with Excel

Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails

Practical Data Analysis and Reporting with BIRT

Practical Data Analysis and Reporting with BIRT

Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails

Principles of Finance with Excel: Includes CD

Mastering Excel 2003 Programming with VBA

Excel 2010 Power Programming with VBA

Formulas and Functions with Microsoft Excel 2003

Mastering Excel 2003 Programming with VBA

Mastering Excel 2003: programming with VBA

Accessing and Analyzing Data With Microsoft Excel

Formulas and Functions with Microsoft Excel 2003

Mastering Excel 2003: programming with VBA

Mastering Excel 2003 Programming with VBA

Building financial models with Microsoft Excel

Mastering Excel 2003 Programming with VBA

Financial Modeling for Managers: With Excel Applications

Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA (Excel Power Programming With Vba)

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