Dynamic Excel 2007 Dashboard Without VBA

Question

Morning guys,

I'm hoping that one (or more) of you can help me.

I have been tasked with creating a dashboard which needs to display trends and have a dynamic frontsheet, preferably with drop-down or data forms so as to update a chart / graph.

The information itself is incredibly limited - the scope of the document is tracking a value (0-4) assigned to a staff member's ability to fulfill a task, e.g. 'Quotes - 4', 'Cancellation - 2' and so on. So the metrics are limited to:

• Month (a worksheet for each month of the year and one front for the dashboard)
• Team (Presently 6 teams, but this is likely to increase over time, so hopefully the solution facilitates relatively easy incorporation of new teams)
• Employee (Self explanatory)
• Task (Presently 25, but as above - subject to change)
• Score (the 0-4 value referred to above)

So as you can see, it's a very simple dataset. The sheets are presently set out with six grids with data validation lists for determining Team and Score (dropdowns for easy data input), with the Task being pre-written and the employee entered manually by the user.

What I'm hoping to do is have a frontsheet with dynamic tables that update accordingly when a dropdown and/or data form is changed. The key focus is on getting the staff members up to 4s for all tasks, so ultimately, the charts will display trends for the individual teams (one chart for each team - 6 charts) on a month-on-month basis and also a dynamic table which can reflect specific information (e.g. employee performance on a specific month, or number of '3s' achieved by a specific team to date).

I've read a reasonable amount on this, but seem to have overwhelmed myself with the sheer amount of options. However, the options can be narrowed given that I'm working on a large corporate network that doesn't really facilitate downloads (so add-ins or anything extraneous to Excel 2007 'out-the-box' isn't an option) and preferably without the use of VBA (1. I'm quite a novice insofar as VBA, 2. Easy distribution and maintainence of the document might be marred by VBA?), though I appreciate that my requirements may dictate VBA to be essential.

Does anyone have any suggestions around how best to proceed creation of this dashboard?

Any and all help is appreciated and I apologise as a newbie if I've contravened any conventions around forum etiquette.

Thank you all for your time,

Rob

Answer 1

There are a couple of things that you need to consider in a task such as this:

a) what sort of output do you require? b) how are you going to manage the data?

For a) I'd separate it further into the basics of what's required (time series charts of employee and/or team performances [how will team performance be measured? average, % achieving 4, or ?]) and then the bells and whistles of drop-downs. Focus on the basics, the other stuff first the whizzy stuff can come later. Getting b) right is vital - you are going to be extracting subsets of the data to build the charts you want to display. Get b) wrong and you'll just create a horrible task for yourself.

In your position I would consider re-organising the data into the form of a table. Excel's help defines what is meant by a table, but in essence it is a list of your observations where each observation simply comprises the score for a particular month/team/employee/task combination (so each observation comprises 5 values). The observations are arranged as successive rows of the table with the first row being the header row which will contain suitable labels such as "Month", "Team", "Employee", "Task", "Score". The real advantage of using a table such as this is that Excel provides a heap of in-built facilities for manipulating them - look up the help for Sort and Filter on the Data tab. In your case there is an even more compelling reason for using a table - you can use the Pivot Table and Pivot Chart facilities for analysing and displaying the data. If you have not used these before some time and effort spent learning about them will pay dividends. Once your data is organised and you know how to use Pivot Tables and Charts you should be able to prototype sum output very quickly.

If you do decide to organise your data as a table you can still keep a nice friendly looking grid of 6 team "tables" (different from Excel's use of the word) as a data entry facility to enter each month's scores by employee and task. You will need to find a way of getting each month's data from the data entry "tables" to the main data table. (Easiest way would be to use a bit of spare worksheet under the data entry tables to reproduce the entered data as a series of observation rows and then use Paste Special Values to append these rows to the end of the main table of observations. You can use VBA to automate the copy/paste operation if you want, you just need to figure out a way of identifying how may observations are currently in the main table and precisely where you want the paste to end up - COUNT() or COUNTA() is a useful friend here). Main problem to avoid (whether automated or not) is to avoid appending same entered data more than once to main data table.

Have a look at http://www.mediafire.com/download/x64swkp689k10a1/DataEntrytoTable.xlsx for a simple example of some of the above thoughts