Dashboards for Excel

CHAPTER 11

Metrics: Performance and Context

Purna “Chandoo” Duggirala, who created and writes for Chandoo.org, is a strong advocate of data context. Consider his article “Never use simple numbers in your dashboards.” In it, he argues for including additional information about single data points. For example, the sales data for a single month can tell only that month’s story. However, including last month’s sales, last year’s sales, and how sales have trended can provide for a much richer story. This is because, in Chandoo’s words, several data points can present a “better story than a simple number alone.”

Telling the Whole Story Like a Reporter: ...