How to Give Your Managers More Insight,
More Quickly, Using Less Time and Money

 

Tens of thousands of Excel users in at least 165 countries are using my dashboard reports to improve business insight and WOW! their managers. Here's why...

 Good Excel dashboards can save hours of time...both when you update your reports and when your managers read them.

 Excel dashboards can present data from any number of sources in one report. Even in one chart.

 They can use any number of built-in and 3rd-party spreadsheet functions to perform special-purpose calculations.

 They're created and maintained by users, who understand what the information means, not by programmers, who usually don't.

 They're a spreadsheet solution, not a macro solution.

  They can adapt quickly -- often, in minutes -- to managers' changing information needs.

 They can trap errors that normal reports typically ignore.

 And, because you already own Excel, your dashboard software costs nothing extra...it's free!

Unfortunately, few people know how to create useable Excel dashboards. But because this is such an important topic, I want to provide you with everything you need to produce your own dashboard reports. That's why I created the Excel Dashboard Kit.

The kit includes my e-book, Dashboard Reporting With Excel, and more than 20 Excel workbooks. You'll learn more about the book and the kit below.

An Overview of the Book

I used to hate spreadsheet reporting.

As a manager, I hated to receive those long Excel reports. I hated to slog through those stacks of paper, each page with long columns of tiny numbers.

Somewhere...somewhere in all those numbers were key trends and exceptions that I needed to recognize as serious problems and opportunities. I hated the thought that I was missing so much treasure hidden in so much clutter.

As a spreadsheet user, I hated to prepare those reports. I hated to spend long hours, month after month, turning the crank, producing reports that people often ignored.

(One time, I accidentally printed three copies of the same page in the same report. No one noticed.)

The IT department was no help. They knew everything about computers, but nothing about marketing, or accounting, or operations. Like slow-motion robots, they gave us exactly what we had asked for weeks earlier; but they couldn't give us the new information we needed TODAY!

IT was too slow, too expensive, too inflexible, too ignorant of our needs. And their changes took forever.

I Discover an Excel Solution

Then I found a solution. It was in an old copy of the Harvard Business Review.

The article, written in 1979, was by George Blake, the VP Finance of one of the largest companies in Mexico. It explained how his company was using many small graphs on one page to report management performance.

In seconds, his managers could recognize critical trends. They could compare one measure of performance to another. They could ignore the expected and concentrate on the surprises. They were freed from those many pages of long columns of tiny numbers.

Large Companies

"With your help and the information in your eBook, I’m creating a dashboard report the likes of which my company has never seen. "I’m sure I’ll get lots of questions and this will give me a ton of visibility in the organization." Scott Papay, Six Sigma Black Belt, Trane Residential Click here to read other rave reviews.

I fell in love with dashboards!

Back then, I was working on my first book, Financial Modeling Using Lotus 1-2-3. Because 1-2-3's charting system couldn't create small charts, I added a chapter that showed how to create "mini-graphs" using text characters in spreadsheets. This solution was primitive, but popular.

Then Microsoft introduced Excel, and I fell in love all over again. With Excel, I could deliver professional-quality management reports.

Finally, in 2004 -- after nearly fifteen years of development -- I decided to show Excel users the truly amazing results we could get from dashboard reporting with Excel. I had to write a book! I had to tell Excel users about the reporting power they already have at their fingertips!

The version for Classic Excel (2003 and before) is 150 pages long; the version for New Excel (2007 and after) is 200 pages.

The books explain two key topics:

1. They explain how to create dashboard reports that provide readers with more information, more quickly, than with any other form of reporting I know of.
   
   
2. They explain how to make your dashboards and other reports quick and easy to update by linking them to a spreadsheet database.

Both topics are mandatory. You never, NEVER want to create an Excel dashboard report that you can't update quickly.

At last count, enthusiastic Excel users in at least 165 countries have purchased my Excel dashboard books and templates. 

My Excel Dashboard Book

Small Companies

"You're my hero! This is incredibly slick. "I'm an independent consultant, and this should WOW a lot of clients." Mark Johnson, Principal, Vector Group Services Click here to read other rave reviews.

Here's a description of each chapter:

1. The Advantages of Dashboard Reporting With Excel. This short introductory chapter tells much about what you already know if you spend much time on this site: Excel can produce great dashboard reports.

I call them "magazine-quality" reports. I also introduce the Management-Reporting Pyramid, which is the best way I've found to describe the level of detail that managers need in their reports.

2. How to Create Mini-Charts for Dashboard Reporting. Mini-charts are a key ingredient of dashboard reporting. This chapter provides step-by-step instruction about how to create them.

3. Charting Techniques for Dashboard Reporting. There's more to dashboard reporting than merely creating small charts. This chapter discusses a variety of other techniques to enhance charting for dashboard reporting. I compare gauges, which Excel doesn’t support, to far better display methods that Excel does support.

4. Create Figures that Use Both Charts and Worksheets. Much of dashboard reporting uses spreadsheet cells to complement charts. This chapter describes typical techniques. The chapter also explains how to force charts to work together. In the dark-red figure on the right below, for example, each column of charts uses the same Y-axis values. This allows readers to compare each company’s performance within each column of the report.

5. How to Use Excel’s Camera Tool. Most users ignore Excel's Camera Tool, but it's crucial for adding tables to Excel dashboard reports. This chapter describes a variety of reporting techniques that only the Camera Tool can achieve. For example, the chapter describes the Mini Briefing Book, which uses the Camera tool to display both a landscape and a portrait figure on one printed page. Both tables are dynamic; they change as the data changes.

6. How to Funnel Data into Dashboard Reports. At first glance, dashboard reporting is all about ways to create a great-looking report page. But the real challenge for Excel users is this: How do we update Excel easily so that dashboards don’t quickly send us to Spreadsheet Hell? This chapter surveys the key techniques, including PivotTables, Excel-friendly OLAP, and the INDEX-MATCH functionality.

7. How to Use Spreadsheet Databases for Dashboard Reporting. In my experience, most spreadsheet databases are badly managed. As a consequence, they often cause more trouble than they're worth. This chapter explains a simple way to set up spreadsheet databases for reliable spreadsheet reporting.

8. How to Build Dashboard Reports in Excel. This is the key chapter in the book. It explains the steps necessary to create dashboard reports somewhat like the ones at the right. More importantly, it explains how you can update these dashboards in seconds. Eight steps are required to build the report, and this chapter explains them all.

9. Magazine-Quality Dashboard Designs. As a general rule, Excel users aren't known for their artistic skills. This can be a problem when we're trying to create professional-quality dashboard reports. So what can we do if we don't have the skills to create good-looking designs? We steal them, of course! Before Bloomberg bought Business Week, BW published great charts and tables. But these days, The Wall Street Journal is my favorite source of examples. This chapter provides a variety of charts and tables that illustrate my "thieving" techniques. For each illustration I briefly describe how to create versions of those figures using Excel.

International Users

"I purchased the Dashbord Kit and I think it's brilliant. It offers clear and precise advice for practical purposes." Sami Järvensivu, Business Controller, Fläkt Woods Ltd. Finland Click here to read other rave reviews.

Information-rich Excel dashboards offer the most effective way I know to explain business performance. Excel users typically can modify these reports in a few minutes, if the data is available.

This means that managers finally can have the information they need, when they need it, in a format that they can understand easily. Finally, Excel users can use Excel to clearly communicate business information.

As far as I know, I'm the only person in the world who has figured out how to (1) create great-looking Excel dashboards, and (2) update them easily. And Dashboard Reporting With Excel is the only book that shows you the important techniques.

Here's What You Get...

The E-Book Kit my dashboard e-book along with more than 20 workbooks, including:

The working dashboard report that the book shows you how to create.

Four Excel database workbooks with sample data for your dashboard report.

The PivotTable workbook, with examples of how to use GETPIVOTDATA in worksheet formulas to return specific values from a PivotTable.

The traffic-light workbook, that you can experiment with to fully understand how it works.

The Camera-tool workbook, with examples of how you can use this valuable tool.

Six chart-figure workbooks that show Excel versions of figures from business magazines.

Get the Excel Dashboard Kit Now!

Learn how to create professional dashboard pages, with mini-charts, tables, and great colors, so you can give your managers, clients, and co-workers information that's easy to understand quickly.

Learn how to create time-saving report workbooks with formulas linked to Excel data worksheets, so you can update your data in minutes and your dashboard reports in seconds.