Clearly and Simply

Lithuania at a glance

A Data Analysis and Dashboard Showcase with Microsoft Excel

This post is about a showcase. Don’t expect too much. I will not provide a detailed how-to tutorial. All you can learn from this post is that you should not toss Excel as a matter of principle, when you have to create Business Intelligence tools and dashboards. Agreed, Excel has its limitations especially with regards to the access to larger external databases. And Excel’s chart engine has some limitations as well. Nevertheless Excel provides the flexibility to create compelling and professional dashboards.

Recently a Lithuanian company invited me to conduct a training to their marketing department. The focus of this training shall be on how to create Excel models including dashboards and visualizations made to stick. I haven’t done trainings for quite a while, but I do remember that the perfect start for a training is a demonstration of what it will be about and what the participants will be able to do afterwards. Therefore I created a showcase based on the Lithuanian Census 2001.

Bring your tasks in a row

How to import Microsoft Project files into Microsoft Excel

Have you ever managed a larger project with several subprojects, hundreds of tasks and milestones, dozens of members in the project team and even more other staff contributing to the project, spread all over almost every department of the company? If so, you might have used Microsoft Project to plan and monitor the project.

Since there were so many different people contributing, you may have encountered the following challenge: You had to distribute the actual project plan to all team members at least once a week, but not everyone had Microsoft Project installed on his computer. So you couldn’t simply send the Microsoft Project file.

Sounds familiar? What do you usually do?

Approach with caution

Multi-select regions on an interactive Excel Dashboard

Have you ever built a data-analysis model in Microsoft Excel for a database containing a geographical dimension like state, county, ZIP-code areas, sales region, etc.? If so you probably wanted to integrate a user-friendly control feature on your dashboard that enables the user not only to select one region, but to filter the data by any combination of regions. E.g. show the total revenues for the sales regions West and Central.

You need a multi-select filter control. This post shows different options of how to do this and includes the example files for free download.

Take Care of Customer Care

A Showcase: 5 steps of Performance Dashboard Design

Using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in Customer Care management is a prime example of Performance Dashboards. Call Center Managers usually monitor the performance of their Customer Care with an extensive list of different metrics and KPIs visualized on one or several real-time dashboards. On a higher level and in a more condensed form the numbers are also reported to the Top Management on regular intervals, usually at least weekly.

Against this background, this post describes 5 steps of designing an Executive Customer Care Performance Dashboard, including an example file for free download.