Clearly and Simply

Category: Dashboards

  • 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

    Excel_EU_unemployment_rates_dashboard10 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.

    (more…)

  • London Excel Meetup Workbooks

    The workbooks used in my presentation on “Analytical and Interactive Dashboards in Excel” at the London Excel Meetup, September 3, 2020

    233 words, ~1 minute read

    London Excel Meetup GroupEarlier today (September 3, 2020), I had the honour and privilege to give a little presentation about Analytical and Interactive Dashboards in Microsoft Excel at Tea Kuseva’s and Alan Murray’s great London Excel Meetup.

    For everyone who attended the session and anyone else interested, here are the workbooks used in my presentation for free download.

    This is the showcase of the interactive English Premier League Dashboard shown at the beginning of the session: 

    Download Dashboard Showcase Premier League (zipped Excel workbook, 2.5MB)

    And this is the workbook used to present the different tips and tricks:

    Download Analytical and Interactive Dashboards (zipped Excel workbook, 2.2MB)

    I have to admit, the live presentation and performance was a bit sloppy on my side (my apologies), so I recommend to download and dissect the workbooks to get the most out of the meetup. I think both workbooks are worth a look.

    Many thanks go to Tea Kuseva and Alan Murray for organizing the event and having me, to Carlos Barboza for suggesting me as a speaker and of course to everyone who took the time to attend the session.

    If you have any feedback or questions, please leave me a comment here or contact me by email.

    Stay tuned.

  • All Peaks of the Alps visualized in Excel

    Bluffing some of Tableau’s amazing interactive features in Microsoft Excel: an Excel Replica of All Peaks of the Alps visualized with Tableau

    The previous post provided a Tableau visualization of all peaks of the Alps. Peaks of the Alps - IntroI already bluffed some of Tableau’s amazing interactive features in Microsoft Excel and published the solutions here.

    The idea wasn’t mine, though, but Matt Grams’.

    Matt started the journey in 2009 (!) with his beautiful guest article Bluffing a Visual Cross-tab with Excel. I followed a few months later with Bluffing Tableau Actions with Microsoft Excel. Ever since, I posted a few techniques to replicate Tableau’s interactive options in Microsoft Excel.

    Back in 2013, I created an entire Excel replica of one of my Tableau workbooks, which was once selected as the Viz of the Day by Tableau: Bruce Springsteen Discography – A Tableau Infographic. This is the Excel replica: Bruce Springsteen Discography in Excel.

    To carry on this tradition, today’s article provides an Excel replica of All Peaks of the Alps visualized with Tableau. Truth be told, of course not replicating all of Tableau’s features, but still some interesting interactive functionality in Excel beyond the defaults.

    (more…)

  • Optimized Choropleth Maps in Microsoft Excel

    How to create optimized Choropleth Maps in Excel with a higher resolution and without distortions using Excel 365

    Inspired by an idea of my internet friend and highly esteemed colleague Leonid Koyfman, the post US Choropleth Map by County per State – a 4th Option described and provided an Excel workbook with a Choropleth Map of the United States including a second map showing a magnified view of one selected state.

    Optimized Chroropleth Maps in Excel (Intro)The code and technique itself worked fine.

    However, there was one major disadvantage: during the process of creating the map in Excel, the shapes were slightly distorted. The zoomed map of one state still looked good for e.g. Texas or California, but definitely not for smaller states like Rhode Island or Connecticut.

    Today’s post provides a solution to overcome this issue: a way to create a Choropleth Map in Excel without distortions, displaying all counties accurately, no matter at which zoom level. As always, an example workbook is provided for free download.

    (more…)

  • Filter Excel Dashboards with Slicers and Timelines

    How to use Table Slicers and Timelines as interactive Filter Controls on a Microsoft Excel Dashboard

    Filter Excel Dashboards with Slicers and Timelines (Intro)The recent posts

    Filter Excel Dashboards with Table Slicers

    and

    Showcase for Table Slicers on Excel Dashboards

    described a technique how to use Excel’s popular Slicers on tables as easy-to-use, interactive filter controls on a dashboard.

    Although the approach can quickly be implemented and is working fine, it has one major shortcoming: for whatever reason, timelines are only available for Pivot Tables, not for tables. If you have a date dimension in your data (and according to my experiences many data sets do), you can’t let the user filter by dates with a timeline on a table.

    Today’s article will describe a work-around to eliminate this shortcoming. As always, the post provides the example workbook for free download.

    (more…)