Time to Consider Excel Dashboard Components?

There is a lot of material written by Excel MVPs on how to create Excel dashboards. One of the most popular sources of information for this is the ebook and templates by Charles Kyd of http://www.exceluser.com/

In this post, I look at the concept of building and using Excel dashboard components. Like complete Excel dashboards, such components would be charts or tables inside an Excel workbook. However, unlike complete Excel dashboards, these “components” would only be part of a collection of components picked by the dashboard’s user. The component would be picked from the spreadsheet, and mixed together with other Excel dashboard components in a full dashboard. End-users would build “personal Excel dashboards” by bringing together the tables and charts they want into a dashboard.

The idea of “component software” is not new: all modern software development environments support the building of software components that are plugged into frameworks. What may be new is the idea of applying the same concept to Excel spreadsheets and Excel dashboards.

The business view: I love Excel dashboards, but only if they show the information I want

According to Brian Carter in http://www.informationbuilders.com/new/newsletter/8-5/04_carter.html, “the use of dashboards continues to be one of the most popular applications of Excel.” He defines Excel dashboards as “a combination of indicative tables and charts, carefully positioned and conditionally formatted within a worksheet. The skilled blending of these elements provides a high-level view of business performance and is designed to trigger responses from the viewer.”

Excel dashboards are popular because Excel spreadsheets are familiar to managers and knowledge workers. They are easy to email and share. And in this bad economy, the fact that they cost so much less than BI dashboards should make them even more popular.

However, I have heard major objections to Excel dashboards from many managers. Some objections have to do with the dashboards not containing the charts and tables they want. Others complain that the “dashboards” do contain the information they want, but they also contain much more information they don’t want. These so-called dashboards are designed to satisfy the needs of whole groups of managers. They are so bloated and so huge that you can’t really call them dashboards (after all, can 15 screenfuls of charts and tables still meet the definition of a dashboard?).

A related complaint is that managers can get multiple Excel dashboards, each with only a part of the information they need. What they want is to have a single dashboard that contains all the information each individual user needs.

The IT view: Excel dashboards require a lot of work – we can only afford to do one shared one

For IT or “power users, ” there is one big difference between Excel dashboards and BI dashboards. Making a dashboard in Excel requires much more skill and effort than creating an equivalent dashboard in a business-intelligence (BI) tool designed specifically for creating dashboards. As a result, there simply is not enough time to make different dashboards for each individual user. Users will just have to make do with a “one size fits all” dashboard created from a template shared by all.

Unfortunately, what happens is that each user requests an additional table, column, or chart that they absolutely want. By the time the poor dashboard author/programmer has placed all the pieces requested by all the users, he realizes he has created a monster. It’s a dashboard not even the author can love.

Bridging View: personalized Excel dashboards built from “dashboard components”

This problem is quite similar to the one that hit mainstream computer applications decades ago. As applications became more and more complex, it became impossible to build them as monolithic programs. The concept of “object-oriented programming” was a first step. But eventually, applications were built as aggregations of independent components.

The most popular portal and dashboard applications today are those that allow relatively unskilled users to assemble their personal dashboards from the components they consider important. Users can just select the components they want from a large set of options, and drag/drop them into their personal dashboards.

Authors and programmers can then focus on making dashboard components, and let users put them together as they wish. This greatly simplifies the task of authors, while pleasing their users more.

We have made it a goal in Excelential to make this dream scenario a reality for Excel-based dashboards. The problem we have seen with Excel dashboards is that making one requires so much skill and care, that ordinary end-users can’t be trusted to build their own. Excel MVPs and skilled users can make and maintain pure Excel dashboards, but casual Excel users will not be able to do so.

We are building Excelential to make it possible for end-users to treat any part of a spreadsheet they receive as a component for their personal Excelential dashboards. As for the authors and developers of the spreadsheets, we are working to allow them to build “ordinary” Excel spreadsheets to serve as the dashboard components.

January 21, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: dashboards

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