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.

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.

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

Studies show that users pay particular attention to the upper left and middle left of a document.

Conditional formatting allows you to look at your Excel reports and make split-second determinations on which values are “good” and which are “bad,” all based on formatting.

A dashboard should provide an at-a-glance view into key measures relevant to a particular objective or business process. This implies that all the data is immediately viewable at one time. Although this isn’t always the easiest thing to do, it’s best to see all the data on one page or screen.

Stephen Few, visualization expert and author of several books and articles on dashboard design principles.

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