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

Chapter 25

Building Powerful Decision-Making Charts

Effective leaders help others to understand the necessity of change and to accept a common vision of the desired outcome.

—John Kotter

Harvard Business School professor

Your dashboard users want to make better decisions faster. Selecting the right type of analytics and visual presentation will help you give them what they want.

An important part of your job is understanding the business decisions that need to be made and the analysis and visual presentation that will aid the decision-making process. The charts and graphs described in this chapter are some of the more powerful charting types for business decisions.

TIP To gain full control over Excel’s powerful charting engine, you need to learn how to handle combination charts. Combination charts enable you to have two y-axes on a chart. You also can have more than one chart type in a chart—combining column charts and line charts, for example.

In Excel 2007 and Excel 2010, you build combination charts by first creating a chart with one format, such as bar, and both sets of data. Then you select one of the sets of data by clicking one of its chart elements, such as a bar or column. The new command Change Chart Type appears in the Type group. Click Change Chart Type to open the Change Chart Type dialog box. Select the second type of chart you want, and click OK.

Usually a combination chart requires two y-axes. To add the second axis in Excel 2007 and Excel 2010, select the data ...