Dashboards, Reports, and M365 Excel

Many Excel users use the words dashboard and report interchangeably and are not able to clearly delineate them. This is often because most people learn to use Excel on the job and not before they are mandated by superiors to churn out reports and dashboards for them. It is not uncommon to have a manager who calls everything with a beautiful chart in it a dashboard and another who believes only specialist software (other than Excel) can create dashboards. Sadly, no analyst who is bounced endlessly between these two types of managers will understand the real difference between a dashboard and a report.

Microsoft sadly adds to the woes analysts face at work by creating different versions of Microsoft Excel. Almost every week, I come across an analyst spending hours and using complex formulas they copied from an online forum without understanding how the 100-plus-characters cocktail of functions works to achieve what is now an easy single function...