Here are two common layouts that I’ve used over and over:

1. The filters along the top
2. The filters on the left side

Honestly, those are the only two layouts you should be using.

In other words, we’d never want to hide the filters along the bottom. And I don’t recommend placing the filters on the right side (because we read from left to right).

Here’s an example of each style.

(1) Dashboard Filters at Top

Here’s an example of a dynamic dashboard with a filter along the top of the screen.

These are pretend numbers, but inspired by a real dashboard I created during a workshop with a nonprofit organization. They wanted to be able to drill-down and look at a single cohort of participants at a time (just the Monday morning group, just the Saturday afternoon group, or just the Sunday evening group).

There are a dozen different graphs and maps, so it was impossible to fit everything on a single screen. (We didn’t want to sacrifice the font size – it’s nice and legible now, and if we shrunk everything down, it would be unusable.) So, the filter stays stuck at the top of the screen, and then the viewers can scroll downwards to see all the graphs.

(In Excel, we froze the panes so that the top few rows wouldn’t move.)

(2) Dashboard Filters Along the Left

Here’s a dashboard about fictional car sales.

There were several charts and maps, and I couldn’t fit everything on a single screen without sacrificing font size and readability.

So, the two filters are frozen on the left side, and viewers can scroll to the right to see all the graphs.

How to Make Dynamic Dashboards

Want to make something similar for your own workplace?

Here are all my dashboard blog posts and YouTube tutorials.

In particular, you might like these examples of dynamic dashboards made in Excel that you can use for inspiration.

Here’s a how-to video about making dynamic dashboards in Excel and another how-to video about making dynamic dashboards in PowerBI.

I also teach private workshops and online courses about dashboard design.

Do you have specific questions? Reach out anytime.

The post 2 Common Dashboard Layouts: Filters at Top & Filters on Left Side appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

We went through the entire data analysis process together: data management, cleaning, tabulation, and visualization. And, we practiced in both Excel and Power BI.

In this 5-part series, you’ll learn some of the highlights from that two-day class.

What’s Inside

• Part 1: Text Editing in Excel
• Part 2: Birthdates into Age Ranges in Excel
• Part 3: Merging and Lookups
• Part 4: Excel Dashboards
• Part 5: Power BI Dashboards

Watch the 5-Part Series

Download the Excel File

It’s here: https://depictdatastudio.kit.com/products/mini-data-bootcamp

The post Mini Data Bootcamp appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

In this article, you’ll see a few examples and how-to tips to get you started.

YouTube Stats

Are you brand new to Excel dashboards?

This YouTube video’s about the how-to process at a glance.

Colonoscopy Screening Compliance

Want a little more how-to info?

In this video, you’ll see me describing the process to my 3rd grader.

I recently worked with the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors. These are made-up numbers, but inspired by their datasets.

Demographics

Want a full-length tutorial?

This is a recording of a 30-minute conference session.

Inside, you’ll see pretend demographic data, inspired by my work at a youth center back in the 2010s.

Grantmaking

This YouTube video is about contiguous datasets–the first and most important piece of interactive dashboards.

I work with a variety of foundations. This is nobody’s real data, but inspired by the types of variables that most foundations keep track of, like grantee names and funding amounts.

State Snapshots

This YouTube video’s about the state icons, but you’ll see a state snapshot example.

Hospital Outpatient Procedures

I recently worked with a healthcare system to visualize their outpatient procedures. We started experimenting with two different layouts.

I don’t consider these visuals to be finished-finished, so there’s no YouTube video or in-depth tutorial about them.

Here’s the first idea, which focuses on market share (which hospitals are performing the most procedures). The user can drill-down by county, city, or service line (the type of procedure).

Here’s the second idea, which focuses on county-level data, not hospital-level data.

Car Sales

When I landed in Boise for a conference… instead of going to sleep after a long airport day… I decided to make a dynamic Excel dashboard for an upcoming training course.

In the first hour, I created a fictional dataset and set up the dashboard.

In the second hour, I fine-tuned the charts and takeaway sentences.

Nonprofit Dashboards

In spring 2025, I led a 2-day Data Bootcamp with the Asian American Health Initiative. As part of our contract together, they asked me to make a YouTube series with some highlights from that fuller training. They wanted to make sure that even more people benefited from data time-savers. (Getting paid to make YouTube videos?! Sign me up!!)

In this 5-part series, you’ll learn about data merging and data cleaning (prerequisites for dashboards). Then, you’ll learn the basics of Excel and Power BI dashboards.

Here’s the 5-part series:

Your Turn

What types of how-to questions do you have for me?

Comment below and I’ll answer as many questions as I can!

The post 8 Examples of Interactive Dashboards Made in Microsoft Excel appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

What’s Inside

• 0:00 Intro
• 2:26 Behind the Scenes
• 3:12 Single Contiguous Dataset
• 3:50 Pivot Tables
• 4:15 Pivot Charts
• 4:24 Slicers
• 4:26 Helper Tables
• 5:35 Step-by-Step Demo

The post How to Make Interactive Dashboards in Excel: Colonoscopy Screening Example appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

Sometimes people think that takeaway text isn’t possible for dynamic dashboards in Excel. They worry that they’ll have to write each sentence by hand. False!

In this video, you’ll learn about two ingredients:

• Concatenation: You’ll use the ampersand (&) to join the content from a few cells together.
• Helper Cells: There are pivot tables, helper tables (with lookups), and more concatenation to write out the graph labels.

You can write takeaway sentences about:

• The most or least (the poles)
• The averages
• Anything else you think your audience might be interested in

What’s Inside

• 0:00 Why we need “takeaway text” in data visualization
• 1:26 Two elements needed: Concatenation and Helper Cells
• 1:41 Concatenation in Excel – the Primary Language example
• 2:26 Concatenation – the Months in Program example
• 3:12 Concatenation – the Household Income example with rounding
• 3:46 Concatenation – the Residence map example
• 3:56 Ideas for takeaway sentences to describe graphs: Min and max, mode, etc.
• 4:36 Helper Cells (linked to pivot tables with lookups)
• 5:38 Need more info??

Your Turn

Download this Excel dashboard and follow along: https://depictdatastudio.gumroad.com/l/Demographics-Dashboard

Transcript

Ann K. Emery: [00:00:00] I’m a big fan of takeaway text, takeaway text in reports and presentations, even in dynamic dashboards like this one.

Now, a lot of times people are like, “Ann I love takeaway text too, but it’s n/a for me. I can’t do it because I have a dynamic dashboard. I can only put…” This is what they tell me. This isn’t true though.

“I can only put the topic. I can’t also put the takeaway message because then as people explore the data, I can’t like manually write all these sentences.” Okay. But false. Look at how the takeaway sentences, let me zoom in so you can see this one a little bit better. Look at how they change as they interact with the dashboard.

It’s dynamic. Look, it says 17 people. And then I’m looking at this one right here at 17 people. And then it says 14, and then it says 11. This one changes. This one changes. This one doesn’t change because it’s always English is the most common language in this fictional data set about fictional programs.

Um, [00:01:00] but if it did change, if it was suddenly Farsi or French, that’s what the sentence would say, because look, It’s concatenated, okay? It’s not done by hand. I didn’t, by hand, just type in, like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That would be a ton of work. It would defeat the purpose of an interactive dashboard, right?

It, like, it wouldn’t be possible to write those by hand. So, This is what this video is about. I’m going to show you behind the scenes how you need these two things. Okay. You need to concatenation and you need helper cells, concatenation and helper cells. I’m going to show you the concatenation first, and then I’ll show you the helper cells in a moment.

Concatenation is is a formula. Okay. I’m going to just going to type this one right here so you can see it. It’s a formula. So you start with equals. You say equals the helper cell you would have already set up. That’s over here. I’ll show you this in a moment. Stay tuned. Okay. Equals the helper cell and double [00:02:00] quotes sentence structure, double quotes.

Okay. Helper cell where you already have English selected and Double quotes, sentence structure, double quotes. English is the most common language at this site. Double quotes. Press enter and your sentence structure is written for you. Let me show you this one. Uh, let me move this one down, make a little bit of space.

It would be equals helper cell. Where do I have my helper cell? It would be under the, let’s see how well I labeled this. Okay, under the months in program section with the pivot tables. Here’s a helper table and I’m going to pick this helper cell. Okay. Equals helper cell and that’s concatenation. It joins things from different cells together and quotes sentence structure quotes.

What did I want this one to say? [00:03:00] 14 people, double quotes, space people have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, period, double quotes. Enter 14 people, blah, Okay. Uh, this one is really, really similar. It’s got two helper cells. It’s helper cell, the number and double quotes people at this site. Up to their open parentheses.

When you have parentheses in your sentences, it gets a little tricky too. Cause some of your formulas are going to have. Parentheses. And here’s the other help or sell with the percentage that I had to round. And then I add to multiply to a hundred and then I had to add the percentage symbol, you know, et cetera, et cetera, double quotes at the end.

What did I have in this one? Participants live in and help or sell. So you have to think about what should the sentence say? And in your real life it’s going to be [00:04:00] different. Then these obviously ideas for you, it would be things like calling out the most or the least the polls that makes interesting data stories.

It could be, um, here’s a poll. That’s the most, it could be a big slice, a little slice, something you think your audience might be interested in. Here’s another idea of showing the most like nine people are from Montana. In this site, whichever site is selected here. Okay, that’s concatenation, concatenation, right?

You’re adding helper cells and some sentence structure. It’s joined by the ampersand. The second thing you need is you need the helper cell, right? So it’s over here and I’ll show you, I don’t know, which one should I show you behind the scenes of maybe this one, the language one. So right here, I’ve got a pivot table.

Of the languages. And then I have a helper table because I needed this helper table to [00:05:00] change it from person to people do that on a couple of the charts, right on zero people, but then this one says one person. So a lot of times I’ll do cells like this, so I can have the actual number, but then the graph label right next door.

I figured out how many languages there were. I did a ma, a Simple Max formula. You’ve seen that one before, right? What is the, what is the most, what’s the category the most? And then I did a X lookup to say if it’s 21 is the most, what language does that correspond to? It’s English. Let me know which of this, these techniques you’d like more info about.

Do you wanna hear more about helper tables about. Graph labels that are dynamic about person versus people, XLOOKUP, MAXFORM, I don’t know, you tell me, you tell me and I’ll get through as many of your questions as I possibly [00:06:00] can.

The post How to Write Dynamic Takeaway Sentences inside Interactive Excel Dashboards appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

Catch the replay here!

Materials

Follow along with the spreadsheet: https://depictdatastudio.gumroad.com/…

You’ll have to watch the video to get the coupon code.

There are codes available for the first 500 people.

What’s Inside

0:00 Intro

1:14 The 4 Steps

4:28 (1) Excel Table

12:36 (2) Pivot Tables

18:14 (3) Pivot Charts

20:47 (4) Slicer(s)

24:33 A Gift for You

25:55 Q&A

The post How to Make Interactive Dashboards in Excel (30-Min Demo & Files to Download) appeared first on Depict Data Studio.