Showing posts with label Excel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Excel. Show all posts

14.11.20

Ludicrous Dashboard

I just saw a post on facebook in which someone shared their dashboard. Gushing comments followed: awesome ... fantastic use of screen real estate ... always love your work ...

There is a link to the video showing how the dashboard was created. He was also gushing about how he set it up to change things at the click of a mouse button. You know, linking one cell to another cell. 

Here is my point: on every screen of this dashboard there are 12 or more metrics/values for each of seven departments ... 84 per screen. Given that he has used sparklines, images, sliders, values ... it is ludicrous to expect anyone to get any value from such a dashboard without having to zoom to, say, 50% or so, thus ruining the desired effect of the thing, surely.

Still, everyone else gushingly loved it. More than that, more and more Excel bloggers are adding more and more features to their own dashboards. Why? Because they can. Why is that so bad? Because it leads to clutter and will have performance implications. But more than that: what happens when Jack or Jenny breaks a link or changes something wrongly?

I suggest you go back to or stay with management by eye, from the old days. 15 ideas on an A4 page or equivalent was an excellent rule of thumb.


Duncan Williamson
14th November 2020

5.11.19

Quora Questions


I write answers on various Excel topics at www.quora.com and this page provides links to some of my answers. They are not normally massively complex questions but I answer the ones that I think might be interesting to my visitors and readers. The pages are probably in reverse order: lastest pages first; but that should not matter!





Update 5th December 2019





How do I convert F to C in Excel?





Can I sort a column of strings in an Excel doc alphabetically by last rather than the first character?





How can you take a profit and loss statement in CSV format and easily load it into PowerBi?





Every CSV I've ever tried to save from Excel (2010) says “filename.csv may contain features that are not compatible with CSV (comma delimited). Do you want to keep the workbook in this format?” Why is this? How can I save it as CSV?





Why does Microsoft Office make it so difficult to guarantee your work is saved?





How do I extract consecutive capitalized words from a body of text in Microsoft Excel?





In Excel Wizards, is there a function that enables me to choose specific texts in a cell based on other keywords (i.e., 'age: "29"')?





Why doesn't Excel recognise comma separated values as separate and filterable?





What is an effective way to categorize and sort large lists of quotes or definitions for someone with limited Excel knowledge?





How do you graph 10,000 data in an Excel chart?





What is paste special in Excel?





What is the x-intercept and y-intercept of two lines x-3y=7 and 2x-5y=4?





What is NPV and its formula?





How can I make a Google Sheets function (in column K, row 5) that compares two rows (4 & 5) in the same column (column J) and then automatically skips 2 rows instead of one when dragged into row 6, so that now it's comparing rows 6 & 7 in column J?





https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-make-a-line-graph-in-PowerPoint/answer/Duncan-Williamson-1





How can one have two things on the same axis in Excel?





This page is on my facebook page and not Quora! The page shows a Power BI image of the flight path of LY1747 of El Al ... it is unusual, to say the least. https://www.facebook.com/william.williamson.144/videos/1600460606762146/





What are some real life examples and applications of multiple regression?





How do you show a subtotal at the bottom of a pivot table without showing the title at the top in Excel?





Which duplicate does Excel remove?





How do you use an exponential equation you get from Excel? I know how to make Excel show me the equation, but how do I "copy" it or use it?





How do I paste a chart from one Excel to a blank Excel?





What are the most unused excel formulas?





What are some typical statistics and plotting made on datasets with 2 columns of numerical values and one column of categorical values?





In MS Excel, I have a large column of times (in seconds and minutes) when events occurred. Is there a way to automatically segment this data to make a frequency distribution table of say 0-5 minutes had 3 events, 5-10 minutes had 0 events, etc.?





Journalizing records data chronologically in accounting. What is the explanation of it?





What is exponential smoothing in Excel?