Excel Dashboard Advice

[stirish]

I am wondering if I can get suggestions from the experts here how best to proceed. I am trying to take my companies 10 sales goals and turn the monthly data into a dashboard so that my boss can quickly view progress. Each goal has a production number, goal, and deficit/surplus to goal. The goals aren’t broken down by segment, but is holistic.

My question is how best to do this? Numbers are updated monthly. So right now I have January’s data and February’s will soon finalize.

How best to impress with visualization and functionality?

Thank you in advance. This forum is amazing!

 

[etaf]

There are quite a lot of things you could do with excel, I used to setup-produce quite a few dashboards for companies when i was consulting
RAG status showing status compared to last month - with arrows - using conditional formattin
some chart showing current v goal
it varies considerably depending on the organisation culture and also the type of goals and targets

There are also a lot of add-ins you can buy to help visualize a dashboard
However, I tried to keep it very very simple
for one board group - it had to be on paper and so the excel feed into a powerpoint template
Once the draft was accepted , i was then able to automate so when the date was added into the dashboard all the figures would update and then feed into the powerpoint and print off a "pack" which included any commentary from the directors of those departments assigned the KPI
Some were monthly, some quarterly and some annual with seasonality

I also tried to keep the KPI to around 5 or 7 at maximum , with a drill down summary

 

[tomanton]

I suggest you read this paper http://perceptualedge.com/articles/misc/WhyMostDashboardsFail.pdf, and explore the whole http://perceptualedge.com site for data visualisation practices