Excel Dashboards and Reports, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9: Components That Group Data

In This Chapter

• Showing top and bottom views

• Tracking progress using histograms

• Emphasizing top values in charts

It’s often helpful to organize your data into logical groups. Grouping allows you to focus on manageable sets of information that have key attributes. For example, instead of looking at all customers in one giant view, you can analyze customers who buy only one product. This allows you to focus attention and resources on those customers who have the potential to buy more products. The benefit is that you can more easily pick out groups that fall outside the norm for your business.

In this chapter, you focus on how you can organize groups of data using dashboard components.

Listing Top and Bottom Values

When you look at the list of Fortune 500 companies, you often look for the top 20 companies. Then perhaps you look at who eked out at the bottom 20 slots. It’s unlikely that you check to see which company came in at number 251. It’s not necessarily because you don’t care about number 251; it’s just that you can’t spend the time or energy to process all 500 companies. So you process the top and bottom of the list.

This is the same concept behind creating top and bottom displays. Your audience has only a certain amount of time and resources to dedicate to solving any issues you can emphasize in your dashboard. Showing them the top and bottom values in your data can help them pinpoint where and how they can have the most impact ...