Excel Dashboards and Reports (Mr. Spreadsheet's Bookshelf)

Your audience has only a certain amount of time and resources to dedicate to solving any issues you can emphasize in your dashboard. Showing them the top and bottom values in your data can help them pinpoint where and how they can have the most impact with the time and resources they do have.

Trending data by day is common, but it does prove to be painful if the trending extends to 30 days or more. In these scenarios, it becomes difficult to keep the chart to a reasonable size and even more difficult to effectively label it. One solution is to show the trending vertically using a bar chart.

When you create a chart, Excel attempts to determine whether your category axis contains date or time values. If so, it creates a time-series chart.

A histogram is essentially a graph that plots frequency distribution. A frequency distribution shows how often an event or category of data occurs. With a histogram, you can visually see the general distribution of a certain attribute.

there may not always be enough space available to add a chart that shows trending. In these cases, icon sets are an ideal replacement, enabling you to visually represent the overall trending without taking up a lot of space.

Although it may seem counterintuitive, it’s generally good practice to de-emphasize labels by formatting them to lighter hues than your data. Lightly colored labels give your users the information they need without distracting

Ideal colors for labels are soft grays, light browns, soft blues, and greens.

Blue and Red are the only colors from the 8 VB colors that are viable in a report or dashboard. The rest of the colors listed are virtually unusable, as they are very unattractive. Fortunately, the Excel palette comes with 56 colors that you can call up using a color code. Every color has a code: The color code for black is 1, the color code for wh

consider using modern-looking fonts like Calibri and Segoe UI in your reports and dashboard.