The term business intelligence (BI), coined by Howard Dresner of Gartner, Inc., describes the set of concepts and methods to improve business decision-making by using fact-based support systems. Practically speaking, BI is what you get when you analyze raw data and turn that analysis into knowledge. BI can help an organization identify cost-cutting opportunities, uncover new business opportunities, recognize changing business environments, identify data anomalies, and create widely accessible reports.
Over the past few years, the BI concept has overtaken corporate executives who are eager to turn impossible amounts of data into knowledge. As a result of this trend, whole industries have been created. Software vendors that focus on BI and dashboarding are coming out of the woodwork. New consulting firms touting their BI knowledge are popping up virtually every week. And even the traditional enterprise solution providers, like Business Objects and SAP, are offering new BI capabilities.
This need for BI has manifested itself in many forms. Most recently, it has come in the form of dashboard fever. Dashboards are reporting mechanisms that deliver business intelligence in a graphical form.
Maybe you’ve been hit with dashboard fever. Or maybe your manager is hitting you with dashboard fever. Nevertheless, you’re probably holding this book because you’re being asked to create BI solutions (that is, dashboards) in Excel.
Although many IT managers would scoff at the thought of using Excel as a BI tool, Excel is inherently part of the enterprise BI tool portfolio. Whether or not IT managers are keen to acknowledge it, most of the data analysis and reporting done in business today is done by using a spreadsheet. You have several significant reasons to use Excel as the platform for your dashboards and reports, including
All that being said, it’s true that Excel has so many reporting functions and tools that it’s difficult to know where to start. Enter your humble author, spirited into your hands via this book. Here, I show you how you can turn Excel into your own, personal BI tool. Using a few fundamentals and some of the new BI functionality that Microsoft has included in this latest version of Excel, you can go from reporting data with simple tables to creating meaningful reporting components that are sure to wow management.
The goal of this book is to show you how to leverage Excel functionality to build and manage better reporting mechanisms. Each chapter in this book provides a comprehensive review of the technical and analytical concepts that help you create better reporting components — components that can be used for both dashboards and reports. It’s important to note that this book is not a guide to visualizations or dashboarding best practices — although those subjects are worthy of their own book. This book is focused on the technical aspects of using Excel’s various tools and functionality and applying them to reporting.
The chapters in this book are designed to be stand-alone chapters that you can selectively refer to as needed. As you move through this book, you’ll be able to create increasingly sophisticated dashboard and report components. After reading this book, you’ll be able to
I make three assumptions about you as the reader. I assume that you
The chapters in this book are organized into six parts. Each of these parts includes chapters that build on the previous chapters’ instruction. The idea is that as you go through each part, you will be able to build dashboards of increasing complexity until you’re an Excel reporting guru.
Part I is all about helping you think about your data in terms of creating effective dashboards and reports. Chapter 1 introduces you to the topic of dashboards and reports, giving you some of the fundamentals and basic ground rules for creating effective dashboards and reports. Chapter 2 shows you a few concepts around data structure and layout. In this chapter, you will learn the impact of a poorly planned data set and will discover the best practices for setting up the source data for your dashboards and reports.
In Part II, you take an in-depth look at some of the basic dashboard components you can create using Excel. Chapter 3 starts you off with some fundamentals around designing effective data tables. Chapter 4 shows you how you can leverage the Sparkline functionality found in Excel. Chapter 5 provides a look at the various techniques that you can use to visualize data without the use of charts or graphs. Chapter 6 rounds out this section of the book by introducing you to pivot tables and discussing how a pivot table can play an integral role in Excel-based dashboards.
In Part III you go beyond the basics to take a look at some of the advanced chart components you can create with Excel. This part consists of three chapters, starting with Chapter 7, where I demonstrate how to represent time trending, seasonal trending, moving averages and other types of trending in dashboards. In Chapter 8, you explore the many methods used to bucket data — putting data into groups for reporting, in other words. Finally, Chapter 9 demonstrates some of charting techniques that can help you display and measure values versus goals.
Part IV focuses on techniques that can help you automate your reporting processes, and give your users an interactive user interface. Chapter 10 provides a clear understanding of how macros can be leveraged to supercharge and automate your reporting systems. Chapter 11 illustrates how you can provide your clients with a simple interface, allowing them to easily navigate through (and interact with) their reporting systems. Chapter 12 shows you how pivot slicers can add interactive filtering capabilities to your pivot reporting.
The theme in Part V is importing and exporting information to and from Excel. Chapter 13 explores some of the ways to incorporate data that does not originate in Excel. In this chapter, you find out how to import data from external sources as well as create systems that allow for dynamic refreshing of external data sources. Chapter 14 wraps up this book on Excel dashboards and reports by showing you the various ways to distribute and present your work.
Part VI is the classic Part of Tens section found in Dummies series titles. The chapters found here each present ten or more pearls of wisdom, delivered in bite sized pieces. In Chapter 15, I share with you ten or so chart-building best practices, helping you design more effective charts. Chapter 16 offers a run-down of the ten most commonly used chart types, along with advice on when to use each one.
As you read this book, you’ll see icons in the margins that indicate material of interest (or not, as the case may be). This section briefly describes each icon in this book.
A lot of extra content that you won’t find in this book is available at www.dummies.com
. Go online to find the following:
www.dummies.com/extras/exceldashboardsreports
This book contains a lot of exercises in which you create and modify tables and Excel workbook files. If you want to follow the exercise but don’t have time to, say, create your own data table, just download the data from the Dummies.com website at www.dummies.com/extras/exceldashboardsreports
. The files are organized by chapter.
www.dummies.com/extras/exceldashboardsreports
At this page, you’ll find out how to use conditional formatting to build annotations into your charts, add an extra dynamic layer of analysis to your charts, and create dynamic labels, among other details to aid you in your Excel dashboards journey.
www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/exceldashboardsreports
Here, you’ll find an extra look at how you can use fancy fonts like Wingdings and Webdings to add visualizations to your dashboards and reports. You’ll also find a list of websites you can visit to get ideas and fresh new perspectives on building dashboards.
It’s time to start your Excel dashboarding adventure! If you’re a complete dashboard novice, start with Chapter 1 and progress through the book at a pace that allows you to absorb as much of the material as possible. If you’re an Excel whiz, skip to Part III, which covers advanced topics.
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