), Operations Manager, Sales Head, Sales Manager, etc. Thus, operational dashboards require live and up to date data available at all times and hence should be dynamic. Stephen Few has defined a dashboard as “a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives which fits entirely on a single computer screen so it can be monitored at a glance”. If you have to provide these dashboards as a report not in Excel, but as a part of a PowerPoint presentation, you can save a lot of time by using VBA to convert the Excel visualizations to PowerPoint slides with a couple of mouse clicks: Agreed, the set-up takes some time and effort. As data is updated in your app, your Excel dashboard will also be updated to reflect the latest information. KPI dashboard templates are available in tabular, pie chart and graph formats for better visualization.

In this chapter, you will get to know the definition of dashboard, how it got its name, how they became popular in IT, key metrics, benefits of dashboards, types of dashboards, dashboard data and formats and live data on dashboards. Here are the 60 lines of code you need to copy to a new VBA module of your workbook: Dim PP As Object Dim PP_File As Object Dim PP_Slide As Object, Private Sub CopyandPastetoPPT(myRangeName As String, _                               myTitle As String, _                               myScaleHeight As Single, _                               myScaleWidth As Single) Dim NextShape As Integer Dim ReportDate As String     ReportDate = Range("myReportDate").Value & " / Week " & _                         Range("myReportWeek").Value & " - " Application.GoTo Reference:=myRangeName Selection.CopyPicture Appearance:=xlScreen, _           Format:=xlPicture Range("A1").Select PP.ActivePresentation.Slides.Add PP.ActivePresentation.Slides.Count + 1, 11 Set PP_Slide = _    PP_File.Slides(PP.ActivePresentation.Slides.Count) PP_Slide.Shapes.Title.TextFrame.TextRange.Text = _    ReportDate & myTitle NextShape = PP_Slide.Shapes.Count + 1 PP_Slide.Shapes.PasteSpecial 2 PP_Slide.Shapes(NextShape).ScaleHeight myScaleHeight, 1 PP_Slide.Shapes(NextShape).ScaleWidth myScaleWidth, 1 PP_Slide.Shapes(NextShape).Left = _    PP_File.PageSetup.SlideWidth \ 2 – _    PP_Slide.Shapes(NextShape).Width \ 2 PP_Slide.Shapes(NextShape).Top = 90, Dim ActFileName As Variant Dim ScaleFactor As Single, On Error GoTo ErrorHandling ActFileName = Application.GetOpenFilename _               ("Microsoft PowerPoint-Files (*.ppt), *.ppt") ScaleFactor = Range("myScaleFactor").Value Set PP = CreateObject("Powerpoint.Application") If ActFileName = False Then    PP.Activate    PP.Presentations.Add    Set PP_File = PP.ActivePresentation Else    PP.Activate    Set PP_File = PP.Presentations.Open(ActFileName) End If PP.Visible = True CopyandPastetoPPT "myDashboard01", _          Range("myInputStartTitles").Offset(1, 0).Value, _                 ScaleFactor, ScaleFactor CopyandPastetoPPT "myDashboard02", _          Range("myInputStartTitles").Offset(2, 0).Value, _                 ScaleFactor, ScaleFactor CopyandPastetoPPT "myDashboard03", _          Range("myInputStartTitles").Offset(3, 0).Value, _                 ScaleFactor, ScaleFactor Set PP_Slide = Nothing Set PP_File = Nothing Set PP = Nothing Worksheets(1).Activate Exit Sub, Set PP_Slide = Nothing Set PP_File = Nothing Set PP = Nothing MsgBox "Error No.

Assign a range name to this cell (“myScaleFactor”). The recommendation is to limit the number of tasks in the timeline. In a sense, dashboards give you a high-level view of your organization’s work and assist you in making snap decisions based on data. This blog may contain links to other web sites. Alignment of strategies and organizational goals. The details include. For example, Key Performance Indicators, Balanced Scorecards and Sales Performance Figures could be the content appropriate in business dashboards. This is crucial since the information on a dashboard would lead to decisions, actions and/or inferences. The VBA will reduce the size of the pictures in PowerPoint to this factor. It is also making those who design the dashboards be independent of the organization’s IT department for obtaining data. A dashboard is often called a report, however, not all reports are dashboards. A sample sales management dashboard will be as shown below − Example ─ Training Management Dashboard. They can be tailored for a specific role and display metrics of a department or an organization on the whole. Benefits of dashboards include the following −. They can also be made interactive to display the various segments of large data on a single screen.

Whether you are creating a spreadsheet for personal use, to pass information to your team or share … Dashboards usually fall into one of these three (3) types: 1. In our example below I used “myReportDate” for the cell containing the actual Friday, “myReportWeek” for the cell with the actual week number and “myInputStartTitles” for the cell above the list with the titles of the 3 dashboards. Excel Dashboard Structure. They can be interactive to facilitate comparisons and different views in case of large data sets at the click of a button. For those who are new to dashboards, it would be ideal to get an understanding of the dashboards first. Download the consolidated software development project workbook (all 3 episodes in one file), including the option to export all dashboards to PowerPoint with one single mouse click: Download Export Excel Dashboards to PowerPoint (Microsoft Excel 2003, 502.5K).