Excel Dashboards and Reports (Mr. Spreadsheet′s Bookshelf)

Overall a fantatic book which is packed with information that is largely new to me. It goes into alot depth on topics rather than just glosisng over them. It also provides some very very good sample data available online. This is the type of book that can make a huge difference to day to day activities at work if you use spreadsheets alot at an advanced level. Even if you are not using advanced Excel techniques in reporting and Dashboards YET! You may well do in the furture, in which case this avery good book to have access to.

Extremely helpful and well written material, from renowned and highly respected Excel experts. This book is a welcome addition to my collection over many years as an Excel user, but having only recently discovered the potential of dashboards as a business tool, I am delighted with the way in which the authors explain in straightforward terms how to develop and implement these useful analytical tools.

I really enjoyed reading this book and managed to work through it quite quickly because it was a very easy read. The only thing I will say with this edition is that it has some flaws. The next edition has probably fixed a couple of the misinterpretations/things I couldn't learn within the book. I.e. the area using the "frequency" code, didnt work for me and I couldn't it to work no matter how hard I tried. I am a PMO manager and I found this very useful for building portfolio dashboards for my day to day project data.

This is a good roundup of dashboards in Excel.

So, do you want to learn how to make management dashboards in excel, or all about excel charts? If the latter, buy this book, you will learn a lot, but if you want to learn about dashboards keep away. I'm new to dashboard design but not to excel. This book is useless for the serious dashboard designer.

Already having an extensive knowledge of Excel and its functionality, I found I needed to learn about creating analytical Dashboards. Having looked around, I have found Excel Dashboards & Reports to be the best guide I could have chosen. Not only is it comprehensive,it provides examples that can easily be related to and it also has supporting downloadable exercises. I thought I knew a lot about Excel, but this has certainly given me a whole new dimension to my work.

This is an excellent book highlighting the power of displaying data graphically and presenting this in an easily accessible format. I use this book on a regular basis

A well written book with plenty of examples and easy to read explanations. Although I haven't had a chance to work ythrought he whole book I can see it covers any Excel reporting need I may have in the future.

For anyone like me, who is consistently being asked to use Excel to create dashboards or metric based reports, this is a great reference tool. Makes Excel very easy to understand and use; especially since it's so widely used in business.

Great

The book is well organized and works equally well as a training tool and as a resource following the training. The examples are valuable and can easily be modified to work with practically ANY business environment.

I picked up this book because I'm building a client dashboard for my company. I was looking for techniques specific to building dashboards in Excel. What I got was a lot of information on building charts and pivot tables. I'm pulling data directly from a SQL Server database into an Excel workbook that is our client dashboard, so I'm not exactly a novice user. As advanced as I am at data extraction and automation, I could use some direction on properly setting up a dashboard in Excel. What are some ways of laying out data in a visually pleasing way? How many tabs of data is too many? What are some pleasing color schemes? I've run into "hiccups" while protecting the tab names, so are there better techniques for that? What's a good way to present a user with a "preferences" tab? Basically, I'm looking for as many tips and tricks as I can find for creating a dashboard in Excel. Unfortunately, and in spite of the title, the book doesn't spend a lot of time talking about dashboard design. There are books out there specializing in dashboards. I was hoping for something like that with Excel in mind. I didn't even mind it rehashing basic Excel knowledge if it showed it in a dashboard-specific way. Instead, only 41 pages talk about dashboards, and much of that is beginner stuff. What is a dashboard? Creating a dashboard data model. Stripping unnecessary elements out of charts. For beginners, this is good stuff. For an advanced user, there are still some good bits. The map on page 22 showing the most important parts of the screen is informative, for instance. The "data model" section was excellent vindication that I had blundered into doing it the right way. Out of those 41 pages, 9 pages were spent on the VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, CHOOSE, and SUMPRODUCT functions. Another 3 dealt with cell ranges and tables. Some of the other information was of dubious worth. The suggestion that you strip unneeded elements out of charts was good advice, but the example chart -- with the grid lines removed, and thus a disturbing lack of scale -- argued against that advice. The next 128 pages are an introduction to creating charts in Excel, with nothing more than lip service paid to the "dashboard" concept. Another 57 pages are spent on creating pivot tables and pivot charts. Then, 13 pages discuss Excel 2010 "sparklines" and 18 pages on miscellaneous charting techniques. Pages 279 to 336 are supposedly "dashboard" specific, but cover things like entering drop down lists, adding trend lines, setting axis starting values, etc. It's all interesting information that a novice would welcome, and it would do wonders to spruce up any chart. It's just not in any way specific to a dashboard. It looks a lot like a general Excel charting and pivot table book that was repackaged with a hot buzzword to generate sales. The book's title has the word "reports" in it. Apparently by "reports" it really means pivot tables. There are no real "reporting" techniques covered. My own favorite technique -- setting all of a worksheet's columns to be very narrow and then merging cells to position the information exactly where I want it -- isn't mentioned. Neither is dynamically changing print headings and print areas in macros. The macro section is very, very basic. It is little more than "here's how you use the macro recorder". There isn't even any mention of how you can password your macro projects so that no one can see your code (which is important if you're using macros to pull data from an outside source via SQL Server). There is some small consideration given to passwording the workbook in general, and pulling data from Microsoft Access, but it's all very rudimentary. This book will leave you copying and pasting if the data comes from, say, a SQL server table. The pages are not exactly dense. There is lots of white space, lots of table and screen capture examples, and each chapter starts with 2 to 3 "dead" pages due to layout. (There are 17 chapters.) It's easy to read and find information, with a thorough index. This is a worthwhile book if you know only the basics of Excel and you want to take the leap into charts and pivot tables. For that reason, and for a few of the interesting bits of information I gleaned (like the data model and the new sparkline feature in Excel 2010) I give this book 3 stars. I think I'm being generous. Only in the smallest of companies would someone who found this book eye opening be handed a dashboard project. If you're in such a predicament, I recommend picking up Stephen Few's "Information Dashboard Design" and getting a book dedicated to Excel charts instead of purchasing this.

When learning on our own we sometimes just scratch the surface - with this book I now feel like a subject matter expert on pivot tables and charts. Excellent book - I highly recommend it.