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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Place the key components of your dashboard in the upper-left or middle-left of the page.

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

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