Dashboard Basics
Dick Kusleika · 2021
This chapter introduces the readers to dashboards and the concepts, skills, and best practices they will need to create them. It helps the readers to determine when to use a dashboard and how to establish user requirements, assemble the data, build the dashboard, and format the dashboard. Dashboards are used to present data. Data can be thought to be at various stages: raw, aggregated, analyzed, and presented. For Excel users, working with data is the best part of dashboard building. The chapter discusses some of Excel's tools for manipulating data. Excel's Remove Duplicates tool is a quick and easy way to delete duplicate records in place without having to use PivotTables or tedious formulas. Formatting can be the difference between a good dashboard and a great one. Fortunately, Excel provides a lot of formatting options for most of the chart types it offers.