Excel BI Dashboards
“Most data displays are time-consuming, difficult to read and packed with unnecessary information and visual fluff. Numbers in tables or graph that are painfully badly designed – often to the point of misinformation – might as well remain invisible” Stephen Few, international data visualisation specialist.
eab group understands the importance to business or IT success of the numbers that measure what is going on and the way they are presented. Inefficiency is occuring when data is presented in a way that people struggle to make sense of and they end up spending a lot of time trying to figure out what a particular report is trying to tell them.
The purpose of Business Intelligence Dashboards is to provide the reader with important, meaningful and useful insight
We assist our clients with their dashboard design by developing Excel based dashboards that:
• Contain key metrics that can be used for decision making
• Are clear and easy to understand
• Facilitate the recognition of interrelationships and patterns
Visualisation tips
- Use Bar graphs when comparing individual values.
- Use Line graph to show and compare changes over time (years, months, quarters, etc.) or sequential data. They make it especially easy to see the patterns of change and to focus on trends
- Use Scatter to compare two sets of numbers at once, possibly revealing patterns and relationship
- Maximize data-ink ratio = data-ink / total ink used to print the graph
- When Grid lines are added, make them just visible enough to do the job by using a light gray color
- Don't use Pie Graph to show part of whole. Use a table/horizontal bar graph instead.
- Don't use 3D graphs to plot 3 variables X, Y, and Z.