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A Brief Look Back:

The First Excel Dashboard Report

Excel dashboard reports have been around a lot longer than you might think. This
page, from 1990, is from the first set of reports that included an Excel dashboard.

Strictly speaking, this isn't the first Excel dashboard report. But it's from the first package of dashboard reports I created to show the power that Excel offered back then.

Keep in mind that Lotus 1-2-3 dominated the spreadsheet market back then.

I created this report with Excel 2.0. But because Excel 3.0 was introduced in December, 1990, I probably printed this page using that version of the product.

In the early versions, Excel charting was extremely limited. So to create this report, I wrote macros that generated each chart in a separate workbook, copied its image to the report, generated the second chart, copied its image, and so on.

This was not a practical way to generate dashboards!

Today, of course, Excel dashboards are more powerful and very easy to use. Today, you can generate your first dashboard report in a few few hours. This is one of the reasons that Excel users in more than half the countries in the world use my Excel dashboard products.