Clearly and Simply

Category: Dashboards

  • Microsoft Excel Site Catchment Analysis (Part 2)

    Techniques to implement the Site Catchment Analysis of Germany in Microsoft Excel

    Site Catchment Dashboard IntroI am sure you are already fed up with articles on Site Catchment Analysis here. I swear it was not my intention to have such an avalanche on this topic here. But it turned out to be a very good example to demonstrate different interesting ideas in Tableau and Excel. After using this example for a how-to tutorial on Calculated Fields in Tableau, I wrote an update for Tableau 6 (Site Catchment Analysis with Tableau 6) and Richard Leeke was kind enough to provide a fabulous guest post series (part 1, part 2, part 3) with excellent insights on how table calculations work in Tableau, also based on the Site Catchment showcase. I finally couldn’t resist to use the example again and showed how this would look like in Microsoft Excel: Microsoft Excel Site Catchment Analysis (Part 1). Since the Excel model is quite a complex workbook, I decided to split this up again into a 2-post series.

    So, please bear with me, I have to bring this to an end now. Today’s post provides some more details on the Site Catchment Analysis of Germany with Microsoft Excel.

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  • Microsoft Excel Site Catchment Analysis (Part 1)

    The Microsoft Excel version of the Site Catchment Analysis of Germany including the calculation of the optimal center

    Site Catchment Analysis DashboardIn October 2010 I used a show case of a site catchment analysis of Germany to demonstrate the power of Calculated Fields in Tableau. During the weeks that followed we had quite an avalanche of follow-up posts on this article: Site Catchment Analysis with Tableau 6 described an upgrade of the original workbook to the new version 6 of Tableau, including the roadblocks I hit during the upgrade. In a fantastic guest post series called “Another Look at Site Catchment Analysis with Tableau 6” (part 1, part 2, part 3), Richard Leeke showed how to overcome most of the disadvantages in my implementation.

    I suspect you may already be fed up with this example. Despite the risk of boring you, I decided to stay a little longer with this topic, mainly for the following 3 reasons:

    • The use case turned out to be a very interesting and yielding example for the discussion of features, techniques, workarounds and performance facets of Tableau Software. I guess everything has been said (especially by Richard) with regards to Tableau. But what about Microsoft Excel?
    • Furthermore, finding data points within a certain radius from a given center has many more use cases than just a site catchment analysis. You may analyze sales performance KPIs, customer behavior or logistical statistics within a certain area. I am convinced, a Microsoft Excel version of the site catchment analysis can be very useful for some of your analyses of geographical data.
    • Last, but not least, the Tableau implementation allowed to display the results of any user selected postcode, but it lacked a feature to calculate the optimal center of any given radius. A task tailored for Microsoft Excel.

    Thus, today’s article will provide a Microsoft Excel workbook to conduct a site catchment analysis and to compare the results of the optimum with any given center, including some nice interactive features on the dashboard. As always the Excel workbook is provided for free download.

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  • Scroll and Search in Excel Dashboard Tables

    How to add a search bar and search functionality to a scrollable table on a Microsoft Excel Dashboard

    Scroll and Search in Excel Dashboard Tables - click to enlargeMore than 2 years back my friend and Microsoft Excel MVP Chandoo gave me the opportunity to publish a series of 6 articles on how to implement interactive Microsoft Excel dashboards on his excellent blog Chandoo.org: KPI dashboards with Microsoft Excel. To my surprise these articles still seem to be very popular over at Chandoo.org and Chandoo’s readers even keep on commenting these posts.

    Yesterday Milind raised an interesting question: Is it possible to add a search bar to the dashboard to look up values in the source data and automatically scroll up or down to the according row of the search result?

    Although Hui already explained how to do this in a comment, I decided to elaborate a little bit on the possible options in this additional article here on Clearly and Simply. Today’s post describes 2 different techniques on how to add a search functionality to a dashboard with a scrollable data table. As always, including the Microsoft Excel workbooks for free download.

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  • Bluffing Tableau Actions with Microsoft Excel

    Selected techniques to emulate a Tableau lookalike dashboard using Microsoft Excel, including some interactive features similar to Tableau Actions

    Actions - Clapperboard ExcelThe recent post described the power of Tableau Actions. Tableau actions allow you to add context and user-defined interactivity features across your workbook. If the user clicks on one of your visualizations, Actions give you full control over what should happen on other worksheets or visualizations. Setting up a Tableau dashboard with various actions like filtering, highlighting and linking to web pages is a piece of cake.

    How about Microsoft Excel? Is it possible to implement a similar interactivity on a Microsoft Excel dashboard? Yes it is.

    Today’s post describes a set of techniques and tricks to build a replica of the Tableau 50 most prominent summits on earth dashboard using Microsoft Excel. As always, including the workbook for free download.

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  • The Power of Tableau Actions

    How to create highly interactive Tableau dashboards using actions: a step-by-step tutorial and an example workbook

    Action - Tableau ClapperboardEven if you are creating the most basic chart with Tableau Software, the visualization already includes a great set of interactive features without the need for using special functionality: clicking on a data point highlights this point and shades off all others. Clicking on an entry in a color legend highlights all data points belonging to this category. Hovering over data points displays tooltips with all used underlying data, and so forth.

    However, Tableau offers even more than that: Tableau actions. Basically, actions are Tableau’s way of sending user interactions across the workbook. The user selects a data point of one visualization and actions give you full control of what is supposed to happen on the other visualizations and worksheets.

    Today’s post includes a detailed how-to tutorial on the power of Tableau actions:

    • what are actions and what can you do with them,
    • what types of actions are possible and
    • a step-by-step tutorial on how to use actions on a dashboard

    The tutorial is based on example data of the 50 most prominent summits on earth and provides a Tableau Public visualization of the final result.

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