Are you inquisitive about the use and benefits of dashboard reporting in Microsoft Excel 2003?
Microsoft Excel 2003 is one of the best applications on the market for dashboard reporting. A dashboard report is a way to visually present critical data in summary so that you can make quick and effective decision. It works much in the same way that a dashboard works. Microsoft Excel dashboards and executive reports are powerful, easy to design and a great way to improve your Excel and data visualization skills. The three major areas that you must address when creating it are ways to bring the data into your spread sheets, to manage the data and link it to the dashboard objects like table and charts and to design the dashboard report.
The following are some of the details of Microsoft Excel 2003 dashboard:
- Excellent quality
- Flexibility
- Error finding
Excellent quality
Mostly, the data should not be entered directly into the spreadsheet. You may copy or past the data but the best option is to connect the spreadsheet to the data source. There is a standard way to communicate with external database called ODBC. You can use this to connect your dashboard to a table in Access or Oracle. The data can be imported using two basic structures: a Pivot Table and Flat Table.
Flexibility
The dashboard reporting in Microsoft Excel 2003 gives users the ability to adapt quickly to the changing requirements. You can replace one chart with another, add new column of data, add a second page, or use a bigger font and change a color. Microsoft Excel reports often present complex ratios, statistical calculation and other sophisticated results that can be displayed very effectively in a dashboard.
The third-party dashboard programs have no built-in method to identify errors in their data. That is, without error correction, the best that you can do is to avoid access to bad data. Microsoft Excel enables you to test for errors in your data. You can compare your data with other data, search for values that are unreasonably high or low, search for missing value and so on.
