Excel Dashboards For Beginners P1 – 4 Cool Features of Excel Dashboards

Want to get started with Excel Dashboards? You are in the right place. Excel Dashboards can look cool, but putting one together can be tricky. In the Excel Dashboards for Beginners series, Chris explains his simple approach for putting together powerful, dynamic and visually-pleasing Excel dashboards that you and your customers are going to love. Let’s get into it!

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Part 1 – 4 Cool Features of Excel Dashboards

The best way to tackle this complex topic is first to develop an appreciation of what a good Excel Dashboard looks and feels like. Chris has built a demo file that you can download and click through – check out the download link above. This dashboard contains four features that all good Excel dashboards share: (1) a helpful layout (2) consistent spacing (3) layering (4) good use of colour.

Let’s go through these features one-by-one, noticing how the are implemented. Make sure you try to implement these in your Excel Dashboards too! Let us know in the YouTube comments how you get on.

(1) A Helpful Layout
How on earth do you get started with an Excel dashboard? An empty spreadsheet can be daunting, so try applying Chris’ ‘three-by-two’ default layout to get things started. In the video, Chris shows how to set up this layout, and how the layout can create a cool Excel Dashboard.

With the layout in place, how do you know what should go where? This depends on your situation; make sure you prioritise by discussing requirements with your customer and establishing the what the most important information is. Since the Western reader’s eye traces from the top-left to the bottom-right corner of the spreadsheet, it is important to place the most important data (Eg. ‘profit’?) in the top-left – don’t hide it away somewhere else!

(2) Spacing
Neat-and-tidy presentation is another feature of a good Excel dashboard. ‘Tidiness’ can be subjective (ask your mother about when you were a teenager), so what rules can we apply here? Consistent row heights and columns are a must. In the video, Chris shows how all columns in the example Excel dashboard are one of two column widths, creating a super clean look and helping the user assimilate the data. Try this approach in your Excel dashboard, you and your client will love it.

(3) Layering
This might come as a surprise, but all cool Excel dashboards showcase this third key feature. When a lot of data is visible (check out your car dashboard), layers help the user navigate and make sense of the information. How can we do this in Excel? Shapes with gradient fill allow us to lift the main dashboard pane from the background. Then, shading around charts and other objects can make them stand out. Check out Chris’s demonstration in the video and have three layers in mind for your next Excel dashboard.

(4) Colour
What constitutes helpful colouring? This is to some extent a matter of opinion, but some general principles can really help. The most important is that colour should be used sparingly, or (at least) judiciously. Too many colours confuse and mean that individual colours lose impact and resonance. Stick to 2-3 key colours and use 1-2 highlight colours (yellow is helpful here) to make the important information stand out. Remember you can use an online colour picker to match your colours to a company brand identity. Chris demonstrates his approach in the video.

Did this video help you get started with Excel dashboards? We would love to hear what you think, and to answer your questions in the comments – so go ahead and leave us a query right there. More to come soon from the Excel Dashboards for Beginners series – thank you for watching!
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[TigerSpreadsheetSolutions]

What would you like to see us cover next in the Excel Dashboards For Beginners Series? Let us know right here, we will get back to you.

[Nessus]

Great topic to explore Chris! 👍 (Ray, USA)

[adrianairina]

Hi, first of all great videos! Can you repeat how do we get the rgf color code of the company logo? Thank you!

[slurrypumper]

Excel Dashboards, how fortuitous for me.  I was just discussing with my bosses and my subordinates this very morning the need to create dashboards for everyone so that we can see how we are doing.  Our department has many people spread out across the country (U.S.A.) located at various clients.  Every year it is a battle to bring visualization to our clients as to how we help them save money in terms of MRO (Maintenance, Reliability, and Operations).  We were thinking that there should be a spreadsheet that contains all of the savings for the client so that they can look at any point during the year and see how we are doing our job.  This helps us with visibility so that the client doesn't think we are just sitting there in some basement office doing nothing.  Awesome, after this weekend NFL games, I needed a little pick me up and now I have it.  Thanks.