Excel Dashboards - Worth the effort?

[Alpha]

Not sure if this is the right place, but anyway....

I work for a College and I'm being asked to find a new way to represent the monthly KPI's. It's essentially student numbers and related funding against target numbers.

At the moment they're VERY data heavy and are not at all clear. We use a lot of data tables to display the information, so the reader needs to have a fairly good idea about the data to begin with, which is obviously not ideal for a KPI.

I've seen (and been contacted by lots of companies selling) Excel dashboards and just wondered if anyone has used them before and if they are worth the effort of setting them up?

If anyone has any other suggestions I'd be grateful for those too.

 

[Participant]

What version of Office do you use? 2007 / 2010 has functionality that will allow you to create a very professional looking dashboard with only a basic knowledge of graphs and formulae (bringing in macros and maybe ODBC if you call your data from a central server). It's also perfectly possible in 2003, just doesn't look as pretty.

I've used them many times as managment reporting tools. The best ones in my experience are the ones that can be refreshed and tweaked by the end user in an easy-to-understand fashion. Yes I'm happy to explain it, but if they can go away and refresh the data themselves, customise style, chart axes, time frames etc. themselves, then they're more likely to use it and less likely to take up loads of my time asking me to change the date range etc.

In my opinion, if the feedback of the current KPI reporting is that it's too focused on raw data and hard to understand, then an Excel dashboard could be a very good tool for you.

 

[Alpha]

Thanks for your reply, it sounds like it might be worthwhile investing the time then. Yes the data would be brought in via OBDC from our SQL server.

At the moment we use 2003, but IT are gradually getting round to upgrading everyone onto 2007. I may have to give them a prod!

In terms of the end user, most of them don't know about tabs in Excel nevermind anything complicated like charts!