Excel Dashboards and Reports, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12: Adding Interactive Controls to Your Dashboard

In This Chapter

• Introducing Form controls

• Using a button control

• Using a check box control to toggle a chart series

• Using an option button to filter your views

• Using a combo box to control multiple pivot tables

• Using a list box to control multiple charts

Today, business professionals increasingly want to be empowered to switch from one view of data to another with a simple list of choices. For those who build dashboards and reports, this empowerment comes with a whole new set of issues. The overarching question is — how do you handle a user who wants to see multiple views for multiple regions or markets?

Fortunately, Excel offers a handful of tools that enable you to add interactivity into your presentations. With these tools and a bit of creative data modeling, you can accomplish these goals with relative ease. In this chapter, we discuss how to incorporate various controls (such as buttons, check boxes, and scroll bars) into your dashboards and reports, and present you with several solutions that you can implement.

Getting Started with Form Controls

Excel offers a set of controls called Form controls, designed specifically for adding UI elements directly onto a worksheet. After you place a Form control on a worksheet, you can then configure it to perform a specific task. Later in the chapter, we demonstrate how to apply the most useful controls to a presentation.

Finding Form controls

You can find Excel’s ...