How to Make Dashboards with Excel
Using Excel to create your dashboard can be pretty easy if you know the basics of Excel. You have a lot of softwares you can use online to create your dashboard but using Excel can give you more flexibility. The reason being is because once you’ve created a dashboard you can manipulate it by adding calculations. Additionally you could quickly convert your spreadsheet data into charts and diagrams.
Below you are going to see a simple tutorial on how to create a KPI dashboard in Excel. If you are a beginner you can find a lot of benefit by following this tutorial. If you are an expert in Excel but new to dashboards you will also benefit from this because it will help to show you how to create a simple dashboard.
You can then build upon this skill to create even advance ones further down the line.
Dashboard Excel Tutorial
You are going to firstly insert your data into the excel spreadsheet. You can do this by inserting it manually or on the other hand you can load up a saved one if you already have organized your data before.
When you are taking on large projects. What you can do is draw out your dashboard layout before you start creating it in Excel.
The reason why this is necessary is because when a project is so large your dashboard can have so many layers. Having a layout before of how you want it to look will help you out a lot in how you want it to be organized.
Next highlight all the data you are going use in your dashboard from your spreadsheet. You are going to then go to home and select conditional formatting which will lead you to create a new rule.
After that you are going to see a new rule formatting window. At the top choose the default rule. You can now use the new rule formatting window to customize your data. All you have to do now is to just experiment with all the different features you are going to see on the new rule formatting window. This will allow you to learn and see what works for you.
As you can see by looking at the tutorial above it’s really simple. Overtime you can even use this as a starting point to build on. You can find a lot of useful tools from third party companies that can help you with your dashboard and make it more sophisticated along with making your job easier.
Additionally you can also find a lot of other tutorials online. That can help you to create other types of dashboard for your sales department, human resource etc.
Another great reason why Excel is so useful is that you can download prebuilt excel dashboard templates online. These are from great Excel users who are contributing back to the community. If you need help you can go on forums and the other users will kindly help you in learning how to use Excel.