CHAPTER 24
Implementing Excel Dashboarding Best Practices

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IN THIS CHAPTER

• Preparing for a dashboard project
• Dashboard modeling best practices
• Dashboard design best practices

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A dashboard is a visual interface that provides at-a-glance views into key measures relevant to a particular objective or business process. Dashboards have three main attributes:

• Dashboards are typically graphical in nature, providing visualizations that help focus attention on key trends, comparisons, and exceptions.
• Dashboards often display data that is relevant only to the goal of the dashboard.
• Because dashboards are designed with a specific purpose or goal, they inherently contain predefined conclusions that relieve end users from performing their own analysis.

Maybe you've been hit with dashboard fever. Or, your manager might be hounding you with dashboard fever. Whatever the case, if you're being asked to create dashboard solutions in Excel, it's tempting to start pulling a few charts...