In this article, you’ll learn about 20 stress-free charts that we can make inside spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel.

These visuals can be added to static or interactive dashboards.

They’re fast for us to make… which means a quick turnaround time for your audiences. No need to wait weeks or months until a dashboard is ready! These visuals are made within minutes, so your dashboard is ready same-day.

This is a preview of everything that’s included inside Dashboard Design. This hybrid course includes 9 modules of self-paced lessons along with live Office Hours.

Module 1 is all about planning, deciding what to include, and iterating.

Module 2 involves hands-on practice to create these 20 stress-free charts.

Visualizing 1 Point in Time

In the first lesson of Dashboard Design, you’ll make stress-free charts for visualizing 1 point in time inside spreadsheet software like Excel.

You’ll create:

• (1) Tallies
• (2) Circles
• (3) Filled Squares
• (4) Outlined Squares
• (5) Bars
• (6) Stacked Bars
• (7) Heat Tables

In the Dashboard Design course, you’ll download the file, practice along with me, and pause and re-watch segments as needed. 

You’ll see my Answer Key with the formulas on the left, and you’ll practice in the Your Turn section on the right.

You’ll learn which techniques are best for small n’s vs. big n’s.

​You’ll see case studies of these techniques being used in real dashboards, slides, reports and even as appendices to technical reports.

You’ll hear me talking about “Big A” Accessibility (508/ADA guidelines) as we go, ensuring that your stress-free charts match your existing branding while also being colorblind-friendly and grayscale-printing friendly.

This is a 26-minute lesson; there are timestamps below the video so you can easily rewind or fast-forward. The timestamps making re-watching segments easier for Future You. 

Every video has captions that can be turned on/off. Every video has a full transcript​, too (so you can skim the transcript and see which lessons will be most helpful to you). Dashboard Design includes ~20 case studies in Modules 8 and 9, and nobody needs to watch them all. You can skip around and see which case studies from fellow participants are most applicable to your own industry and workplace.​

Visualizing Exactly 2 Points in Time

In the next lesson of Dashboard Design, you’ll create stress-free charts for visualizing exactly 2 points in time.

These are the charts you’ll need for before/after, pre/post, baseline/endline, etc. dashboards.

You’ll create:

• (8) Slope charts
• (9) Column charts
• (10) Win/loss columns
• (11) Deviation bars
• (12) Checkboxes
• (13) Sort-of checkboxes with squares
• (14) Sort-of checkboxes with circles

3+ Points in Time

Do you collect and share data every week, month, quarter, or year?

These are the stress-free charts that can showcase your time series patterns.

​Inside Dashboard Design, you’ll create:

• (15) Trendlines
• (16) Column charts
• (17) Win/loss columns

Progress Towards a Goal

​Then, you’ll create:

• (18) Checkboxes
• (19) Deviation bars
• (20) Spillover bars

Putting It All Together

​In the final lesson of this module of Dashboard Design, you’ll practice applying all the skills you just learned.

You’ll take this boring, black and white table…

…and transform it into a professional, skimmable dashboard. 

This is the first of many before/after transformations you’ll make alongside me.

Later in the Dashboard Design course, in Module 3, you’ll practice making more of these static dashboards from start to finish. Static dashboards are great for busy, non-technical audiences who just need a 1-pager of key findings. 

In Modules 4, 5, 6, and 7, you’ll make interactive dashboards in Excel.​

Your Turn

Comment here: Which of these stress-free charts are you already familiar with? Which ones are new?

The post 20 Stress-Free Charts for Dashboards (That You Can Make in Spreadsheet Programs like Excel) appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

They’re not supposed to cost an arm and a leg.

They don’t even need to be outsourced to a consultant.

Dashboards are supposed to be fast and easy. We make ’em quickly. We give the numbers to leaders. They make data-driven decisions. That’s it! Stop overthinking it.

In this article, you’ll see examples of real dashboards that you can use as inspiration for your own workplace. No need to start from scratch. Adapt one of these dashboards instead.

Grant Deliverables

In this blog post, you’ll see how Josephine Engels did need to start from scratch — she was visualizing these metrics for her organization for the first time — and then made several dashboards to track grant deliverables.

Josephine writes, “My colleagues have given very positive feedback, as the dashboards have made it easier to analyze their program data more comprehensively. They especially appreciate one-pagers that can be shared with different stakeholders, including board members and program collaborators.”

Board Packets

In this blog post, you’ll see how Kristen Summers used “better storytelling with the same data” to transform a couple packets for her board.

Kristen writes, “This resulted in a much more well-received document with lots of compliments from board members! I have begun creating a cohesive aesthetic for all the documents I produce for the board to give them the information they need but in the most streamlined way possible.”

University Monthly Reports

In this blog post, you’ll see how I transformed a university library’s monthly report.

I write, “The before version only looked at one month at a time… I visualized the percentage of the goal that had been achieved so far… In some areas, the library has already exceeded their goal, so the bars spill past the 100% mark—a cause for celebration!”

Quarterly Monitoring

In this blog post, you’ll see how Shawna Rohrman designed “a prettier and more effective dashboard” with Excel.

Shawna writes, “Even with just these few changes (and using a program nearly everyone can access!), our new performance monitoring dashboard has made it so much easier for our team to review quarterly progress in one place and visualize how our system of early childhood programs are working for children and families in the county. The dashboard has become a quarterly staple at our staff meetings, where we review as a group and use the data to generate next steps. It is also easy to share with senior leadership, so they can see at-a-glance the important work our programs are doing.”

Agency Progress

In this blog post, you’ll see how Danci Greene, Emily Rose Barter, and Britani Baker used “an iterative process to hone the perfect data visualization.”

They write, “[We] recently used an iterative process to turn my agency’s annual goals document into a dynamic visual dashboard… Our iterative process has taken us all the way from a Word document to this dynamic, visual dashboard that uses length and color to bring the numbers to life.”

Revenue and Expenses

In this blog post, you’ll see how “transforming your pie charts into a dashboard – built in good ol’ Microsoft Excel – can be more useful for your organization’s leaders.”

I write, “The pie charts and bar charts above were only giving the viewers a single snapshot in time. To manage effectively, leaders need to monitor trends over time… Viewers should never have to lay two pages beside each other or scroll through documents to make comparisons.”

A Tired Data Table

In this blog post, you’ll see how Mia Schmid revamped a “tired data table” that “did a terrible job of communicating what we needed to know.”

Mia writes, “This is a huge improvement to how we have tracked organization-wide goals! The dashboard is so much easier to read compared to the table format and is a much more engaging way to communicate our progress than merely throwing a bunch of numbers into a table and expecting staff to make sense of it. This dashboard also communicates more than just progress towards goals. When I first put this dashboard together I was struck by how many of our programs either exceeded or under-achieved on their goals for 2017. Goal setting is one area we have been working on with each program and this dashboard has also enabled us to communicate to leadership why appropriate goal setting is so important—achieving a goal by 349% signals to me that the target set by the program is questionable.”

Family Trivia Event

In this blog post, you’ll see how Emily Ross used dashboards “to make a family trivia event even better.”

Emily writes, “I can’t wait to continue to apply the tips and techniques I learned both at work and for fun! Maybe at next year’s trivia I’ll have to test some of the dashboard designs for comparing change over time.”

Learn More

Want to transform your tired tables into effective dashboards? Learn how inside Dashboard Design.

The post Don’t Start from Scratch! Make One of these Dashboards Instead appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

One per program, school, or state?

Copying and pasting is tedious and destined for typos.

Instead, produce a series of matching dashboards through the magic of lookup functions and drop-down menus.

Save time with my automation process.

You’ll create one template and then auto-magically populate it with the rest of the data.

Want to give it a try?! Here’s how.

Step 0: Get Your Dataset into Excel

Let’s pretend we want one dashboard per program.

Our dataset might look something like this.

(These are fictional numbers, and they don’t add up to the correct denominators, so don’t look toooo closely, ha!)

Step 1: Build the Drop-Down Menu

Click on the cell where you want to create a drop-down menu.

Go to the Data tab.

Click on Data Validation.

Allow a List.

Choose the Source (e.g., the first column of the Data sheet).

It’ll look like this:

Step 2: Build the List of Variables

In the Variable Name column, use Paste Special to transpose the headers from the Data sheet into this Charts sheet:

In the Column # column, tell Excel where that variable lives in the Data sheet.

For example, the Program name is in the first column of the Data sheet, so type 1.

In the Value column, use vlookup to transfer the information from the Data sheet into the Charts sheet.

Step 3: Build the Charts

The charts are simply linked to the values off to the left, like this:

We’re obviously not limited to bar charts.

In real-life examples, I’ve used waffles, icon arrays, lines, donuts, lollipops, histograms, and choropleth maps.

I just wanted to keep the charting piece as simple as possible for this example (so your brain could focus on the links between the drop-downs, lookup formulas, and charts).

Once the charts are finished, use concatenation to write sentences, like this:

Time for the final touches. You’ll add a title and subtitles; color-code by category; and set everything to be printer-friendly and PDF-friendly, like this:

Everything is linked!

When you select the program name from the drop-down menu…

That program’s data feeds into the Values column (thanks to the lookup formula)…

And that program’s data feeds into the charts.

Don’t worry; the recipients won’t see the formulas behind the scenes. And they won’t see the Page 1 watermark-ish mess.

They’ll see their own PDF, with their own data, like this:

In real-life projects, we sometimes add all these dashboards to the appendices of technical reports (simply by using Acrobat to combine PDFs).

Work Hard Once

With this process, you can create one template and auto-magically populate dozens or hundreds of matching dashboards.

No typos!

No tedious copying-and-pasting from Excel into Word or PowerPoint!!

Work hard once!!!

Create one template, and then let the drop-down menus do the heavy-lifting.

Real-World Case Studies

I’ve used this process in consulting projects to:

• Design matching 2-pagers for every state, territory, and tribal area that offers home visiting services (State A had its own 2-pager, State B had its own 2-pager, etc.)
• Design matching 4-pagers for each grantmaking area for a foundation’s board meetings (Focus Area A had its own 4-page dashboard with key metrics, Focus Area B had its own dashboard, etc.)
• Design matching 10-page survey results tables for every university that responded to a survey (University A saw their own survey results, University B saw their own survey results, etc.)
• …and a dozen more over the past decade.

Your Turn

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

Comment below and I’ll answer as many as I can.

The post How to Make a Series of Matching Dashboards in Excel appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

In this video, let’s make a starter dashboard in Microsoft Excel.

You’ll learn how to make four quick visuals:

1. Sparklines
2. Data bars
3. Symbol fonts
4. Color scales

I use these visuals over and over in my real-life consulting projects.

Watch the Tutorial

Sparklines

Sparklines are helpful for visualizing patterns over time, like daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual data.

To create sparklines:

1. Highlight the first row of your table.
2. Go to the Insert tab.
3. Go to the Sparklines section.
4. Click on the first one (a Line sparkline).
5. Choose where we want to put the sparklines (off to the right of the table).
6. Click insert and enjoy the sparklines!

We can also edit our sparklines!

We might adjust the data source, type (from line to column), or color. I typically gray everything out and highlight a high point or low point in a dark brand color.

We can also group and ungroup our sparklines (e.g., if we want each category in our dashboard to have its own color).

And if we change our mind, we can clear them out.

Data Bars

Data Bars give us horizontal bars (as opposed to sparklines’ vertical columns).

They’re helpful for visualizing summary statistics like totals or averages.

To create data bars:

1. Highlight the cells you want to visualize (e.g., the total column).
2. Go to the Home tab.
3. Click on the Conditional Formatting button.
4. Select solid-filled data bars.

Symbol Fonts

I use checkboxes to visualize whether I met a goal or target.

We can get quick checkboxes through symbol fonts!

In the video, you’ll see me write an =if() statement to transform g’s and c’s into Webdings checkboxes.

Audiences love the checkboxes. They’re intuitive, colorblind-friendly, and grayscale printing-friendly.

Color Scales

a.k.a. heat maps or heat tables.

I love color scales for visualizing the interior of my table—when I want to compare lots of rows and columns to each other.

To create color scales:

1. Highlight the cells you want to visualize (i.e., the interior of the table).
2. Go to the Home tab.
3. Click on the Conditional Formatting button.
4. Select Color Scales. Most of the time, we’ll use a Green-White Color Scale. That’ll make the big numbers dark (and the small numbers will be light).

Combos

In real life, we might combine several of these techniques.

We might add color scales to the interior of the table…

We might compare the totals with data bars…

We might add Webdings checkboxes to see whether we met a goal…

And we might add more data bars to see how far we were over or under our goal.

Formatting

In real life, we’d edit these quick visuals.

I suggest:

• Using brand colors and brand fonts.
• Outlining the color scales in white (so the cells can be differentiated against each other).
• Placing the data bars in a separate column than their numeric labels.
• Coloring the checkboxes (rather than boring black).
• Adjusting the colors in the over/under bars (to avoid scary red).
• Moving the labels to the over/under bars to their own column (via an =if() statement to save time).

Download this Spreadsheet

Try it yourself!

Download this spreadsheet.

Explore the completed version with the =if() statements.

Use the empty version to practice alongside me as you replay the video.

Get in Touch

If you get stuck, reach out o­n LinkedIn.

The post How to Make a Not-So-Scary Starter Dashboard in Excel appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

—

When COVID-19 pushed many events online, I decided to host a virtual Christmas trivia event for my family.

Participants answered questions over four different rounds in teams of three to six people. The rounds each had five questions and all questions were Christmas- or New Year-themed.

Before: Compiling the Data in a Spreadsheet

To support scorekeeping, teams had an individual score sheet where they wrote and marked their own answers.

I had a master score sheet that would automatically pull their scores together so all teams scores were combined into one page.

I’d then show this master score sheet via screen share at half-time and at the end of the event.

The master score sheet looked like this:

While it brought all the scores into one place, it wasn’t very easy for my participants to quickly pull out the key information (i.e., how well their team was doing).

I decided to apply some of the lessons I learned in the Dashboard Design course to make the sheet more accessible.

After: My Trivia Night Dashboard

First, I had to decide what type of dashboard I wanted to make.

In the course, Ann provided a handy Dashboard Cheat Sheet that helped me see different options.

I decided because I had one time point and wanted to compare categories (i.e., teams) that bars would likely be best.

I also decided to convert the numerical scores into percentages because not all rounds had the same number of possible points. Percentages would be a more consistent indicator.

Now it was time to make the dashboard.

It was easy to follow along step by step with Ann’s stacked bar dashboard video tutorial.

I made the following dashboard using the Data Bars feature in Microsoft Excel:

What I Learned about Dashboards and Excel

Not only were the steps easy to follow, but I also learned about better dashboard and Excel practices.

These tips help make your life easier and your dashboards more editable and readable.

Some of my lessons learned include:

• Always put a title, subtitle, and date on the dashboards.
• If your text is in a colour, make it bold so it is easier to read.
• Add a white border around cells to add white space.
• Use cell styles and Theme Colours to make formatting more consistent and easier to edit (I somehow did not know about this in Excel even though I use it regularly in Word).
• Give yourself a bit of time to do the final editing to make it sure fits on a page

With this dashboard, I found it much easier to see:

• How well teams did in each round (e.g., team 6 struggled with Round 4, but excelled in Round 3).
• How teams compared to each other.
• How hard each round was (e.g., Round 2 was on average harder than Round 3).

Designing a Second Dashboard

Encouraged by my dashboard attempts, I decided to try one more dashboard.

I wanted to know within each round, which questions did teams get right and wrong.

This would help me identify which questions were too easy and which were too hard. It’s a fine balance to get when hosting trivia!

I thought about including it in the same dashboard above, but I then I watched one of Ann’s videos about the four types of dashboards.

This reminded me that it’s okay (and even better) to make different dashboards for different audiences.

I had to do a bit of data cleaning first. I ended up with a table that showed for each question in each round the percent of teams that got that question fully correct:

While it had the information that I needed, I found it hard to identify any patterns or the take home message.

I remembered that in the Dashboard Design course Ann had a video on how to compare categories using heatmaps. (Here’s a blog post tutorial you can read.)

I used the steps to create this:

What I Learned from My Second Dashboard

As with the first dashboard, there were some great tricks.

Essentially, if you’re doing something manually (like changing the text colour to white on the darker cells or individually colouring cells) there is almost always a better way! You can use Excel’s conditional formatting to automatically color-code background fills and/or font colors.

I found it much easier to identify patterns both within round and across rounds.

For example, teams generally had a harder time with questions in Round 2 than they did with Round 3 (there are more lighter cells).

Using this dashboard, I could easily pick out questions which were too hard and too easy.

Questions That Were Too Hard

Round 1 – Question 4: What is the name of this dish and where is it eaten on January 6? (Answer: Rosca de Reyes; Mexico)

Round 2 – Question 2: What is the highest grossing Christmas movie (according to Wikipedia)?

Options: a. The Grinch b. Krampus c. The Polar Express d. Elf

(Answer: The Grinch)

Questions That Were Too Easy

Round 4 – Question 2: What fruit is a traditional stocking stuffer?

(Answer: Citrus fruit like an orange, mandarin, clementine)

Round 3 – Question 4: What performance is this song played in? (Bonus: Who is the composer?)

(Answer: The Nutcracker; Tchaikovsky)

(Sound clip source: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, via Wikimedia Commons)

I really enjoyed how approachable and practical the videos in this course were.

I can’t wait to continue to apply the tips and techniques I learned both at work and for fun!

Maybe at next year’s trivia I’ll have to test some of the dashboard designs for comparing change over time.

Connect with Emily

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilysross/

The post Using Dashboards to Make a Family Trivia Event Even Better appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

—

Are you tired of text heavy reports to summarize grant findings?

Do you want to update the look and feel of your reporting templates?

Save time and energy by using static Excel dashboards to design your grant deliverables. 

Your program data will come to life before your eyes and your readers will thank you. 

Read on to learn more about my journey implementing static dashboards in a non-profit context.

Dashboard Design Course Comes to the Rescue

New to dashboard design, I enrolled in Ann K. Emery’s Dashboard Design course to help tackle an upcoming grant report with many moving parts. 

Mental Health America of Greater Houston’s (MHAGH) Center for School Behavioral Health (CSBH) received a two-year grant from the Rebuild Texas Fund in 2018 to help 9 school districts in the Greater Houston Area address emerging behavioral health needs from Hurricane Harvey and improve their ability to respond to future disasters. 

My Challenge: 9 School Districts x 21 Recommendations

To assess school district capacity for addressing student behavioral health needs, CSBH uses a rubric with 21 recommendations for addressing the prevention, early intervention, and treatment of behavioral health issues in students. 

My challenge was to show the progress each of the 9 Rebuild Texas school districts made implementing the 21 recommendations from start to finish of the grant.  

Using Static Dashboards to Track Progress Over Time

Cue the entrance of a tool that saved me time and created a great looking end-product: static Excel dashboards.

Here’s how I created two different styles of dashboards: A project overview, and individual report cards for each district.

Dashboard Showing the General Overview

To create a general overview tracking school district progress, I did the following:

• Clustered school districts in groups of 3 and added grey lines for easier reading.
• Used the start and end years to list how many recommendations were completed.
• Inserted trend arrows to show which districts had improved.  I decided to remove the arrows for neutral or declining trends to simplify takeaways and make the report less “busy” for the reader.
• Inserted deviation bars to show percentage of change from start to end.
• Ordered results from largest to smallest amount of change.

Individual District Report Cards

I then created individual district report cards by:

• Inserting checkboxes to indicate recommendation completion.
• Replacing deviation bars with progress bars to show the depth of implementation of each recommendation.
• Including grey shading in the background of the progress bars to indicate progress remaining.
• Inserting trend arrows to further indicate improvement since there might have been progress in implementation even though the recommendation was incomplete.

Recommendation-by-Recommendation Summary

I also included a recommendation-by-recommendation summary, which was categorized by fully and partially completed recommendations.

Conclusions Section

Finally, I created a section for conclusions to inform the reader of the progress made as well as areas for future improvement. 

Lessons Learned

Here are three lessons learned.

Excel is so Versatile

Excel is much more versatile than I thought.

There are so many functions in Excel that I was underutilizing, so many hidden treasures. 

The amount of visualization that can be done with the conditional formatting command alone was eye opening. 

Why pay more for expensive software when Excel can do the work?

Save Time Using Only One Software

Transferring work from Excel into other products can be overkill when you can just do it all in Excel. 

Save time by designing single or multi-page reports in Excel. A cinch after taking the Dashboard Design course.

Formatting Matters

This course helped me break bad habits and reconsider my assumptions. 

Here are some formatting takeaways:

• There is such a thing as using too much bold text.
• Consider using landscape view when designing reports. It’s easier on your reader not to have so many items crammed into a narrow portrait view.
• Use more white space, less is more.
• Webdings and Wingdings font, who knew?

Colleague Reception

While I enrolled in the Dashboard Design course to help me with a very specific project in mind, I have since designed static dashboards for all of my organization’s program areas and am only getting started! 

My colleagues have given very positive feedback, as the dashboards have made it easier to analyze their program data more comprehensively. 

They especially appreciate one-pagers that can be shared with different stakeholders, including board members and program collaborators. 

Upcoming Goals

Next on my list is using automation to create a series of matching goal tracking dashboards that let programs see their progress toward grant metrics by funder.  I am embracing automation in 2022! 

I’ll also be visualizing accounting data to help programs get a better understanding of their funding use. The areas for application within our organization are endless.

I hope other non-profit professionals working with data will be able to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity. 

Connect with Josephine Engels

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephine-engels-mhagh/

The post Creating Reports for Grant Deliverables Using Excel Dashboards appeared first on Depict Data Studio.