What’s Not to Love About Excel Dashboards?
By Brian Carter
The arrival of Office 2007 will undoubtedly cement the love affair millions of users have with Excel. New conditional formatting features such as inline data bars, color scales, and a library of icons provide slick visualization effects that can be applied with very few clicks.
More than 16 million colors are now intelligently arranged into various themes, eliminating the burden of creating complementary blends of color that are critical to a visually appealing worksheet. These are just a couple of the new features neatly organized in a new tab-based interface called “the ribbon,” and consequently, seem custom-made for the creation of Excel dashboards.
The use of dashboards continues to be one of the most popular applications of Excel. The-out-of-the-box features in Excel purely facilitate a rich presentation, as well as a rapid interpretation of data. The familiarity and affluence of Excel offer many levels of users comfort and satisfaction when analyzing their business.
Excel dashboards are usually a combination of indicative tables and charts, carefully positioned and conditionally formatted within a worksheet. The skilled blending of these elements provides a high-level view of business performance and is designed to trigger responses from the viewer. Excel Dashboards are helping all classes of users manage their business from the small company all the way to the enterprise.
So what’s not to love about Excel dashboards?
The basic challenge
The ability to provide real-time information is critical to the success and credibility of a dashboard, but unfortunately happens to be the most challenging aspect of the design. The data that makes up an Excel dashboard can come from a variety of sources. This is true for even the smaller departmental dashboards. Excel has out-of-the-box methods of getting data into a workbook, but access can be limited.
The built-in query function in Excel works seamlessly with Access and SQL Server, but what if access to relational data or other atypical structures is required? ODBC can be used to access most data sources, but that requires an additional step of setting up the connection on the desktop which is not exactly second nature to most Excel users. Not to mention, even if a connection can be established, will the data be decipherable to the user?
Power users with no power
The power in “power user” typically translates to the skill of creating a high-quality Excel workbook, not in the ability to master data connectivity. Data access tribulations are what keep the creation of Excel dashboards in the hands of a select few technical users. This also sustains power users’ current dependency on IT resources to provide data connectivity and desktop maintenance. So what’s a powerless power user to do?
Business Intelligence to the rescue
The inclusion of WebFOCUS can provide a solution for users with inhibited access and limited knowledge of the various data configurations that make up the enterprise WebFOCUS’ new Quick Data add-in for Excel restores the power to power users providing an immediate connection to virtually any data source.
There are no configuration or connection steps; users simply point Quick Data to a server for access to some 300-plus supported data sources. The addition of a rich metadata layer ensures all data is presented coherently for the perfect complement to Excel’s imperfect data capabilities.
The perfect match
Quick Data is the ideal complement for Excel dashboards, allowing users to build new queries against any data source and seamlessly blend the data with other visual elements in the worksheet.
An unlimited number of queries can be used to provide all of the necessary viewpoints of the business. Since Quick Data is integrated with Excel Query, users can easily combine formatting from the WebFOCUS reporting engine while also taking advantage of Excel’s superior styling capabilities and visualization features.
Quick Data automatically provides named ranges for each table and column of data, as well as native formulas for computed fields and totals. This guarantees data integrity and assures that all references within the workbook are precise and accurate. Queries can also be automatically refreshed upon opening of the workbook or at any timed interval providing real time analysis. The tables are fed via Quick Data and the charts are fed via the automatically generate named ranges.
As you can see, matching the powerful easy-to-use features of Quick Data with the latest and greatest version of Excel can seamlessly provide quick and accurate data to the ever popular Excel dashboard.
