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Excel Dashboards: Who Needs Them, Anyway? [and a Challenge]

Posted: 12 Dec 2010 05:26 PM PST Blog by Jorge Camoes

[You may win a free access to my Excel dashboard tutorial. Read below.]

You are not happy at work. I can clearly see that. Morale is low due to the economy, but it’s

something else, isn’t it? You feel handcuffed. You keep hitting a wall. It hurts, hitting a wall

while handcuffed…

You work with data. There is a formal BI tool in your organization, but it is unusable (IT is

proud of it). You spend your precious time copying data from the tool to Excel. That’s why

you leave work late. You could be with the guys at the bar, or playing with the kids. You

enjoy working with data, but not like that. It takes ages for you to do something because of

those stupid, time-consuming tasks.

More Pain

Another quarter, another quarter review. You could update a PowerPoint presentation but

no, top management changed the metrics (it always does), and you have to redo everything

from scratch (Sisyphus is your middle name). And because of the branding thing, only a

square inch is available for real content, like those 3D pie charts they love so much.

Recently, a competitor launch an under-the-radar campaign in some counties. Your sales

went south. The data was there, sleeping like angels in the IT servers. But a report was

missing and the IT guys can’t tell the difference between a tortilla and Venus de

Milo, so that went unnoticed. The IT is now planning a new report that will be implemented

using the BI tool, as soon as all requirements are met, of course. It should be available by

the end of next year. The beta version, I mean.

Guts ‘n’ Pies Management

You know that something is wrong, you just know. Data is expensive, the BI tool was/is

expensive and the end result is a few tables and some fancy charts. Is this a proper

decision-supporting system? It isn’t. It’s a farce called guts-and-pies management. Gut-

based decisions and pies to justify the expense (I mean, the investment). And you hate it.

So You Start Wondering

You are not an Excel expert, it’s not your job, but you’ve been trying to automate as many

boring tasks as possible. You ended up a reluctant advanced Excel user.

And then a while ago you discover that two charts side by side are much better than one in

each slide. It’s almost a dashboard. That plotting growth against market share in a scatter

plot makes much more sense than making two bar charts (by the way, there isn’t a 3D

scatter plot available in Excel and this chart actually forces the audience to wake up and

think; that’s why it is banned from so many organizations). You don’t know it yet, but you

are discovering data visualization.

I see that you are asking some inconvenient questions, like “how can I connect a workbook

to the Oracle database?”. The IT starts disliking you. Your 3D chart ratio and PPT effects

are much below average. Your presentations, I’m afraid to tell you, are boring. Their

opinion, not mine.

What are you going to do now?

There is no way back. You must know how deep is the rabbit hole. You must know more

about Excel, about dashboards, about data visualization. Because good data analysis,

visualization and communication are long-term skills that will help you stay competitive

in the labor market. You can easily design a dashboard with those skills. Excel is optional,

but if you want to actually implement a working dashboard in Excel you must learn some

advanced formulas and not-so-advanced VBA (yes, I know, you are not a programmer, you

don’t have to).

Your Current Job

Your plan is to learn how to create an Excel dashboard, find some unmet needs and design a

couple of dashboards that you’ll try to sell internally. That’s a good plan, but don’t fall in

love with the dashboards. Make sure they see the difference between the dashboard and the

current reports, but draw a line. Consider them prototypes and tell the management IT

should implement them (it should be easy, with such an expensive BI tool, right?). They will

hate you, of course. Do you mind?

You are a naive if you think that these dashboards will change anything. They will not.

Corporate culture changes slowly and there are many misconceptions about charts. If, in

spite of everything, you like to work there,  try to find a good sponsor in the management

team and work with her. It’s your only chance.

Resources

You need some good resources, so here are some of the best. Read Edward Tufte’s and

Stephen Few’s books. They are not optional. Subscribe to leading blogs. Jon, Chandoo,

Mike, Daniel or Debra can help you a lot. Don’t let yourself to be distracted from your goal

by all those great visualizations you keep stumbling upon. And, shameless plug, you can get

access to my Excel dashboards tutorial.

Turning Off the Crystal Ball

My crystal ball also tells me that you are a male, in your late twenties or thirties, graduate

school educated and work for a fairly large organization, in marketing, sales or finance (not

IT, God forbid!). If you are a manager you manage a small department, five people at most.

Is this correct? Please don’t tell me that you are a little old lady with too much spare time…

you aren’t, are you? I’m still training my clairvoyance skills and I may be misreading some

signs.

So, if this is not you, who are you? And what do you need Excel dashboard for? You can

undress in the comments below… And if you are not comfortable with that, you can start by

“I have this friend…”.

[So, here is the deal: leave a comment here until the end of next Friday, Dec. 16, (US Pacific

time). The best comment wins a free access to my Excel dashboard tutorial. Trackbacks are

OK too, if you prefer to discuss this in your blog.]

______________________

Want to create better dashboards? Try the Excel Dashboard Tutorial.