Overview
- Dashboards are ubiquitous in the industry. Every analyst should be well versed in how to create dashboards.
- Excel is an excellent tool for creating powerful dashboards and we will see 5 examples from different industries here.
Introduction
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Business analytics involves using data to make crucial decisions at the strategy level. The question is: How do we represent that data in a way that helps our leadership team or decision makers reach consensus quickly? These are your skills as an analyst and a dashboard specialist will shine.
Let me take a simple example to illustrate this.
Let's say you are a sales manager in a large corporation. You must make critical business decisions based on revenue, seller performance and other key metrics. How would you do it? Would you be scrolling through thousands and possibly millions of rows of data or looking at metrics individually?
This can be very fortuitous. Step up – Control panels! Creating powerful and impactful dashboards is a key part of the role of an analyst and, cream, top executives love well-made dashboards.
Many of you may be wondering: Why excel to create dashboards? Microsoft Excel offers many options for creating dashboards and is also one of the universally accessible tools for most organizations. What's more, many small startups may not be able to afford very expensive business intelligence software. Therefore, MS Excel provides the advantage in creating dashboards.
In this article, we will discuss five powerful Excel dashboard templates for different domains.
This is the fifth article in my Excel for Analysts series. I highly recommend reading the previous articles to become a more efficient analyst.:
I encourage you to check out the resources below if you are a beginner to Excel and Business Analytics:
Table of Contents
- What is a board?
- Excel dashboard n. ° 1: online sales tracking
- Excel dashboard n. ° 2: marketing analysis
- Excel dashboard n. ° 3 – Projects management
- Excel panel n. ° 4: income tracking
- Excel dashboard n. ° 5 – Human resources management
What is a board?
The most useful panel (or at least the one referenced) at this moment is the Covid-19 Tracker. Now that we have understood the importance of dashboards. Let's understand what dashboards really are.
We can use this panel to understand the scenario in your country, state and city. It gives us the flexibility to choose between cumulative and daily data. The board is updated daily and is a great example of how powerful boards are..
But before we dive into the Excel dashboards, let's answer the key question: What exactly is a dashboard?
A dashboard provides a high-level overview of your business. As usual, consists of several graphics, tables and visualizations that are pleasing to the eye and easy to interpret. Panel layout and content are predetermined and always available at the click of a button, which helps in the quick decision-making process. These dashboards are often useful for breakdowns.
For instance, as sales manager, let's say you want to see sales for your country. Find that sales in a state represent the 80% of your total business! Now you may want to take a closer look by digging into city-level sales in the dashboard.
Now that we know what panels are, Let's delve into the different types of panels that we can design in Excel!!
Excel dashboard n. ° 1: online sales tracking
In the last times, many businesses are closing their offline stores and opening sales on their websites. The post-COVID-19 era seems to rely heavily on the online marketplace. If you sell things online or even if you have a small business, then this board from Microsoft will help you make crucial decisions. 
Keeps you updated by tracking your business metrics, as sales and profit. This dashboard provides a very simplistic view of your business and, but nevertheless, is very powerful. If you're just starting your Excel dashboard journey, I would recommend you start with this dashboard template.
Excel panel n. ° 2: marketing analysis
Whether you work in a large organization or a startup, the marketing team drives the sales of your product or service. Marketers must do a lot of research to understand their customers, business and general trend.
Let's look at a simple and elegant board that will serve almost all marketing teams:
Lead generation is a crucial process for companies around the world. A potential customer is anyone who shows interest in your product or service.. This potential customer can express their intention in many ways, how to put your product in the cart (e-commerce), contact you directly or through any other marketing channel. You can provide more information about your products and services to the potential customer so that they can become your future customer..
This dashboard helps you keep track of key performance indicators (KPI) marketing basics.
Excel dashboard n. ° 3: Projects management
Project management is a very complex job that includes several stages and processes. Since it requires a lot of planning and evaluation, here's another amazing board for project managers or business analysts to help you keep track of your project:
The dashboard keeps track of your tasks, schedules and budgets by incorporating multiple visualizations such as Gantt charts, general status of the task, budget and pending items. Helps you optimize your project, keeping your project on schedule without exceeding your budget.
Excel dashboard n. ° 4: Organizational chart
Operating income is the income generated by the main business activities of the company. This board It is a bit advanced than the previous ones. Provides the expenses and income of the company from an operational perspective:
The dashboard offers the option to choose the region from the top. One page dashboard provides a breakdown of company data. Also includes one of my favorite sparkline visualizations. You should definitely test the functions of this template in your own Excel dashboards.
Excel dashboard n. ° 5: Human Resources
This is a very interesting Human resources management dashboard since it is from the pre-COVID-19 era. This one page dashboard essentially provides you with all the general key metrics one would like to see and ask about the HR department.:
On the board, you have the option to choose the region and department from the drop down menu. This panel includes various color schemes and many interesting visualizations that you should try for yourself!!
Since the world is in the middle of a pandemic right now, many companies are choosing to work from home culture. According to you, What should be the metrics that need to be captured to create HR dashboards in the post-pandemic world? Let me know in the comments!!
Final notes
In this article, we cover five powerful Excel dashboards from different domains to help you become an efficient analyst. Hope these templates help you create amazing dashboards and save you a lot of time.
If you liked this article, let me know what are your favorite dashboard features that you think make a great dashboard.
