Balanced Scorecards and Operational Dashboards with Microsoft Excel, 2nd Edition

Chapter 19

Creating Miniature Charts and Tables

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

—Jack Welch, 1935

Chairman and CEO of GE

When possible, business dashboards should have the information necessary for a business decision on a single information-rich dashboard. Most often you need dashboards that show just the critical few metrics, but for some dashboards and for highly experienced decision-makers, you want to create information-rich dashboards. To do so, you can’t use glitzy gauges or large charts; what you need are sets of miniature charts that fit in a single display.

Balanced Scorecards show a collection of information related to the drivers and success of an organization’s strategy. If you want to see all of these metrics at one time, and any related trends and alerts as well, you need to use miniature charts arrayed on a larger scorecard. As illustrated in Chapter 30, clicking the titles of these miniature charts drills down to detailed charts and data.

Miniature charts are not used for a detailed examination of data values. Rather, by putting numerous miniature charts in one display, you can see many trends, relationships between many metrics, and proximities to target values.

Using Miniature Charts, Tables, and Sparklines for Greater Information Density and Improved Layout

When you try to put multiple Excel charts on a dashboard, you find that you can put about four charts on a ...