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Excel Dashboards and Reports for Dummies, 3rd Edition
book

Excel Dashboards and Reports for Dummies, 3rd Edition

by Michael Alexander
January 2016
Beginner to intermediate
384 pages
8h 46m
English
For Dummies
Content preview from Excel Dashboards and Reports for Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1

Getting In the Dashboard State of Mind

In This Chapter

arrow Comparing dashboards to reports

arrow Getting started on the right foot

arrow Dashboarding best practices

In his song “New York State of Mind,” Billy Joel laments the differences between California and New York. In this homage to the Big Apple, he implies a mood and a feeling that come with thinking about New York. I admit it’s a stretch, but I’ll extend this analogy to Excel — don’t laugh.

In Excel, the differences between building a dashboard and creating standard table-driven analyses are as great as the differences between California and New York. To approach a dashboarding project, you truly have to get into the dashboard state of mind. As you’ll come to realize in the next few chapters, dashboarding requires far more preparation than standard Excel analyses. It calls for closer communication with business leaders, stricter data modeling techniques, and the following of certain best practices. It’s beneficial to have a base familiarity with fundamental dashboarding concepts before venturing off into the mechanics of building a dashboard.

In this chapter, you get a solid understanding of these basic dashboard concepts and ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781119076766Purchase book