Catalog   

Plug-n-Play Excel Dashboard Reporting...

How to Quickly Create & Update Professional
Dashboard Reports in Excel 2003 & Before

Excel dashboard reports provide more information with less reading time and effort than standard reports or BI displays.
And they offer much greater flexibility at a much lower cost!

by Charley Kyd
Microsoft Excel MVP

(If you use Excel 2007 or beyond, see How to Quickly Create & Update Professional Dashboard Reports in Excel 2007 & Beyond.)

Do most of your Excel reports look somewhat like these gray examples?

If so, your managers and other readers must work hard to transform those numbers into useful insight. But your Excel reports don't have to be that way. They could be easy to read and understand.

The figures below show dashboard reports created entirely with Excel. These professional-quality reports work somewhat like the dashboard of your car. At a glance, your readers can easily review a massive amount of data, quickly discover patterns of performance in the data, and easily remember what they've seen.

Excel users in more than half the countries in the world use Excel templates like these to create reports for their clients, co-workers, managers, or investors. You can do the same, using any version of Excel on either a PC or a Mac.

Of course, if there's something you want to change about these reports, you can do so easily. This isn't complex software. It's only Excel.
 

High-Quality Reports

These reports look like they came from the pages of a business magazine, or from the business graphics department of a high-priced consulting firm. Unless you tell your managers, they probably won't guess that you created the reports in Excel.

I created these reports with one primary thought in mind: As Excel users, our purpose is to communicate business information clearly and quickly; our purpose is not to impress our audience with pretty pictures.

Therefore, these reports avoid chart junk...the distracting eye candy that many commercial dashboard companies add to their expensive dashboard systems. This is why my reports don't include gauges, 3D images, or other visual toys that act as a barrier to communication. Instead, these reports are designed to clearly show information that your co-workers and managers need.
 

Fast-Updating Reports

Well-designed Excel dashboard reports combine two important features; one is obvious, one is not.

The obvious feature is illustrated at the right: professional-quality report pages. This feature is important because the reports will delight your managers and other readers, as the testimonials in the right-most column illustrate.

Even so, the other feature probably is more important to Excel users, Dynamic Updating. Here's what this is all about:

If you want to update your reports quickly each period, your report workbooks should contain no data. Instead, they should contain only a few settings, along with formulas that return data from a simple database workbook.

Then, when it's time to update your reports, you take three steps:

1. You add new data to a column in your database workbook.
    
2. You change a date value in one cell of your report.
    
3. You recalculate your workbook. (If Automatic Calculation is set, this happens automatically. Otherwise, you press F9.)

Any number of reports can link to the same database workbook. This means that you update your database workbook once and then use it in any number of dynamically updated reports. This reporting strategy can...

• save you many hours of work each month, because you merely change a date cell then recalculate to update any report.
   
•  improve the accuracy of your reports, because all reports get their data from the same database workbook.

From a personal standpoint, here's why dynamic-updating is more important to most Excel users than having popular reports: We Excel users never want to distribute popular reports that take a long to time create. That situation traps us in Worksheet Hell.

I designed these reports to avoid Worksheet Hell. The reports all link to two simple database workbooks. One workbook contains actual performance data, the other contains target data. (If you don't need target data, just enter zeros for your targets.)

In short, formulas are dynamic; data is static. Your reports should be dynamic if you want to update them quickly. And that's exactly how I designed IncSight DB.

Inexpensive Reports

Because these templates offer such great value, I originally planned to charge hundreds of dollars for them. But I decided to lower the price. I want as many people as possible to be able to generate their own Excel dashboard reports, and even $100 is beyond the reach of many budgets.

But $100 would have been a bargain:

• Commercial dashboard software typically costs tens of thousands of dollars and takes many days to set up. But my reports provide more information per report than the expensive systems, and my reports are easier to read.
   
• Custom Excel dashboard reports of this quality could cost thousands of dollars for just a few reports. But IncSight DB includes twenty report designs and twenty color themes, for a total of 400 report-and-color combinations.
   
• None of the expensive solutions would allow you to generate your first reports in a few hours, and modify them easily. But you can do that with my reports.
   
• None of the expensive solutions would teach you Excel techniques that you could use with your other Excel reports. But that's exactly what IncSight DB allows.

This package offers significant benefits that the expensive systems lack. However, instead of thousands of dollars, or even hundreds of dollars, I've set the price at $49. This is about $2.50 per report page, or less than $.13 per report if you factor in the 20 color schemes available for each report page.

Get started today and distribute your first Excel dashboard report by tomorrow!

			Set up your first Excel dashboard report in less than an hour. Add any number of reports. You can update your reports in seconds because they're linked to an Excel database. Choose from 20 Excel templates, plus 20 color schemes. These dashboards use only Excel workbooks. Nothing is hidden or protected. There are no macros to run. And there's nothing to install.   Classic Excel version: —PC Excel '97-2003: —Mac Excel 2004: $59 USD (If you use Excel 2007 or after, see IncSight DB, Version 2) Availability: Guarantee: Licensing: Instant download. One-year, unconditional. One work copy plus one personal copy.

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