Select and Highlight across an Excel Dashboard

Interactive Excel Dashboard visualizing unemployment rates in the EU. Select a country, filter by age group and gender, and see the selection highlighted across all visuals on the dashboard

1,176 words, ~6 minutes read

10 years ago, I published a post demonstrating how to highlight one selected item across all charts and views on an interactive Excel Dashboard:

Highlighting on Excel Dashboards

Unlike most of my other publications here, that post actually did make some friends.

And even more, it won a real fan: my good friend and Microsoft Excel MVP Carlos Barboza (Carlos’ LinkedIn Profile, Carlos’ blog: Spilled Graphics) liked this workbook so much that he even included it in some of his presentations, e.g. his great speech on the Global Excel Summit in 2024.

Recently Carlos asked me, if I could provide a version with an updated data source. Of course I can. And while I was at it, I also made a couple of (hopefully helpful) changes.

Today’s article provides this updated version of my European Union Unemployment Rates Dashboard from 2015. It also briefly discusses why interactive dashboards in Excel are still a viable option, even nowadays with Tableau and Power BI.

The Basic Idea

The basic idea of this dashboard is enabling the user to select one item (the member state of the European Union in this example) and highlight this selection across all charts and views on the dashboard. The interactivity allows the selection in different ways by clicking directly into a table, a chart, a map or by using slicers.

Now, applications dedicated to create data visualizations and dashboards, like Tableau or Microsoft Power BI, provide this as built-in features. That being said, you can implement comparable selection and highlighting features in good old Excel, too, provided you are willing to include a little bit of VBA in your model.

What can you do with this dashboard?

The underlying data source contains only one metric: the unemployment rates (percentage of population in the labour force) in the European Union per year since 2010, and by country, age group and gender.

You can easily analyse the data by directly clicking into most of the views on the dashboard to change the current selection or filtering:

• Click on one of the row headers of the data table to select a country or on a column header to select a year
• Click on on any item of the vertical axis of the bar chart to select a country
• Select a country by clicking on it on the map
• Filter the data by age group by clicking on the vertical axis of the dumbbell chart
• or, use the slicers on the right of the dashboard to select a country, year, age group or gender
• finally, you can even pick one of 22 predefined colour schemes to be used in the filled map with the drop down menu at bottom right of

All views on the dashboard will highlight the selected country and filter the relevant views by year, age group and gender.

Here is a small demonstration of the features as a gif:

If you want to play around with the dashboard on your own, you will find a link to the Excel workbook for free download at the end of this post.

What’s new?

Here is what is new compared to the workbook published back in 2015:

• First and foremost the data, of course. It now covers the years 2010 through 2024, including more age groups (7 instead of only 2) and also gender. The data was taken from the official EU EuroStat website
• Drop-downs (combo boxes) to select a country, year or age group (and now also gender) have been replaced by slicers at the right side of the dashboard. This makes the selection and filtering easier and more intuitive
• A dumbbell chart at bottom right shows the distribution of the unemployment rates for all age groups in the selected year: the selected country, the countries with the smallest and highest values and the (unweighted) average
• Many formulas have been rewritten to use the modern Excel 365 functions (like SORT, SORTBY, LET, XLOOKUP and others) and dynamic arrays
• Finally, some formatting and rearrangements on the dashboard have been made, e.g. showing the current selections / filter at top left, switching the data table and the band/line chart and others

Why Excel?

I assume, some of you are now tempted to post a comment like “Why in the name of God are you still using Excel to create an interactive dashboard? Use Power BI or Tableau, instead. They have all the features built-in you are showing off here.”

And I fully agree. For a data set like the one used in this example, the implementation of an interactive dashboard with similar (or even better) features would be way easier and faster with Power BI or Tableau. No doubt about it. But using this simple data source here was for demonstration purposes only.

That being said, what if your data analysis requirements are beyond aggregation, sorting and filtering? What if you do not simply visualize a data model from an external database or a simple data table? What if you have to perform complex calculations before you can visualize the results on a dashboard?

For instance, some months back, I implemented a comprehensive financial model in the field of IFRS 16. The model forecasts all relevant IFRS 16 measures (lease liabilities, interest, right of uses, depreciations and others) for thousands of planned leasing contracts for the next 30+ years on a monthly basis. Maybe this would have been possible with DAX in Power BI or Calculated Fields in Tableau, too. But the task was tailored for Microsoft Excel and guess what? I implemented it in Excel. And of course, the model also provides interactive dashboards to enable the users to analyse the calculation results directly in Excel.

So, here is my take:

• Power BI and Tableau are the best tools to visualize an external data model or table as long as you do not have to perform a lot of complex calculations to get to the results you need
• However, if the data to be visualized is the result of sophisticated calculations or even an algorithm, you are definitely better off by taking advantage of Excel’s flexibility and calculation engine. Today’s example shows that you can still provide a highly interactive dashboard inside of your Excel workbook

So, even with all the great built-in features of Power BI and Tableau, interactive Excel dashboards still have a lot of relevant use cases.

The Download Link

Are you interested in having a look for yourself? Download the workbook for free here:

Download EU unemployment rates 2010-2024 (Microsoft Excel 365, 1.02 MB)

Well, I used to close my blog posts with “stay tuned”, but after not publishing anything in 5 years, I probably shouldn’t do this anymore. Maybe there will be some new content here in the next few months, but I am not making promises anymore.

Anyway, thanks for stepping by and reading.