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Enterprise Dashboard

Unlike a good dashboard report, enterprise-dashboard.com is hard to navigate and it’s hard to distinguish content from ads. And it opens up a new browser on every clicked link. But it does present many interesting examples of dashboards and ways to depict data.

It’s also useful as a source of quick biz jargon. Where else could you learn that managers at a software company “check on the in-flight status and health of their projects”? They need to play Biz Jargon Bingo.

Last reviewed 16 September 2007

Lightweight data exploration in Excel

The Juice Analytics site describes several light, easy ways to display data within in an Excel worksheet–and without using Excel charts.

Use the REPT function, with or without conditional formatting, to create graphs of your data within a worksheet cell.

A discussion of the Juice Analytics’ article on the Lifehacker site provides other similar ideas including creating a mini Gantt chart within worksheet cells.

Last reviewed 8 February 2008

Pervasive Hurdles to Effective Dashboard Design

I’m not saying that Excel is an ideal platform for dashboards. It certainly doesn’t provide all of the functionality that a good dashboard product ought to include (for example, great data connectivity), but it is a good alternative for now to many of the dashboard products that work poorly, despite their high price tags.

Stephen Few discusses the limitations of software used to create business dashboards. Read other articles about communicating quantitative business information at Stephen Few’s site.

Last reviewed 26 October 2007