1. financial flash dashboard demo
2. sales flash dashboard demo
3. sales management dashboard
4. airline dashboard demo

As I discussed in my comment to the Spy’s post is that a little animation goes a long way.

If “animation” only means slick effects showing the graphics being constructed, then it is a waste of resources and of the user’s time. A good dashboard does not need animation. The graphics should appear instantly in their completed state.

If the animation shows the user how conditions or performance have changed over time, then it may be a worthwhile animation. It must be done cleanly, with controls that allow the user to stop and start the animation, and stop at any intermediate place during the process. I have described a number of animation examples in this blog, and all of them show the development of one state from another, with playback control buttons that everyone is familiar with. But this type of animation is usually better for more detailed descriptions than are effective in a dashboard.

A good dashboard could also benefit from interaction, rather than animation. Interaction may mean the ability of a user to drill down on a chart to see further information, or the ability to change some inputs to see effects on predicted behavior.

The animations provided in the Fusion Charts examples do nothing to elaborate on the data. They do not clarify information in the data. They serve only to entertain the user instead of instantly showing the information that was called up. Therefore the Fusion Charts animation qualifies as gratuitous eye candy. Such animation does not belong in any effective business dashboard.

In 2008 Excel Dashboard Competition Winners the winners of the 2008 Excel Dashboard Competition are announced:

1. Wade Stokes – International Bank Dashboard

Displaying many disparate Banking Key Performance Indicators, and designed as the basis for the Management review of business performance, it truly achieves More Information per Pixel.

2. Jim Uden – Outpatient Surgery Center Dashboard

Developed for Meridian Surgical Partners, as a one page snapshot for the review and presentation of partnership level business operations and trends. Jim also includes probably the best associated description of dashboard content and the thought processes involved which we’ve seen.

3. Hitesh Patel – Pharmaceutical Sales Dashboard

Developed by Hitesh Patel and Mike Askew of Data Intelligence, for Bristol Myers Squibb. A key report for the Regional Sales Managers, containing the information required to run the business in terms of cash, growth, share, and competitive performance.

In More Information per Pixel!, they display a very nice report by Professor Rolf Hichert:

Rolf very effectively uses the technique of small multiples with sparing colors to highlight high and low performers among a portfolio of organizations.

These MicroCharts guys are really onto something.

A dashboard report is not a set of dial gauges that mimics the cockpit of a 747. A dashboard report is the combination of a large number of small, well-designed charts and tables, thoughtfully integrated to pack a great deal of information into a small area on screen or on a printed page. In this post I describe some free and commercial resources for creating dashboard reports, particularly within Microsoft Excel.

Dashboard Resources

Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge has spent a career learning and teaching what techniques effectively display data so that human eyes can readily perceive it as information and human minds readily analyze it as knowledge. Stephen has written two books entitled Show Me the Numbers and Information Dashboard Design, which explain how to present information in ways which are known to be effective, based on the psychology of cognition and the physiology of vision. These books are very good references for understanding perception and cognition in terms of informational display.

Businessman and Excel MVP Charley Kyd of ExcelUser explains the benefits of dashboard reporting, and shows how to construct robust dashboard reports with clearly written procedures. Charley has incorporated Few’s approaches with his own background in Excel financial analysis to produce a comprehensive guide to using Excel to produce efficient dashboard reports. Charley’s commercial materials include an e-book, Dashboard Reporting with Excel, and a number of example workbooks that show the concepts and techniques behind effective Excel dashboard reports. In addition to construction of dashboards, Charley shows how to design a system of workbooks and directories so that regular updates of a dashboard is painless, taking minutes instead of days.

In his intelligent and informative blog Charts, Jorge Camoes discussed dashboards. Jorge takes a pragmatic approach, and offers instructions on dashboarding in Excel as well as reviews of other charting products. His Excel posts include How to create a dashboard in Excel, Excel Dashboards: do you need VBA?, and 10 tips to improve your Excel dashboard. Jorge has reviewed the use of Crystal Xcelsius as a dashboarding environment, and found it lacking (which matches my own experience), and he has provided a link to a dashboard best practices paper by Dundas, maker of fancy charting software. Visit Jorge’s archive of dashboard-related posts.

Excel MVP and author Mike Alexander of DataPig Technologies has written about Excel pivot tables, integrating Excel and Access, and about dashboards. Mike has written about Crystal Xcelsius, and his new book, Excel 2007 Dashboards and Reports for Dummies is being released this month.

Excel MVP Chandoo of Pointy Haired Dilbert has written a series of posts about dashboarding techniques for Excel. He has a comprehensive list of these posts at Excel Dashboards.

The Dundas white paper Dashboard Best Practices is available both online in html format and as a pdf document. In Jorge Camoes’ post Dashboard design: we need best practices for best practices, Jorge finds that the content of the white paper accurately reflects the philosophies of the experts cited above; unfortunately he also finds that the Dundas charting package and documentation seems to promote conflicting practices, with special graphical effects obscuring the accurate dispay of information.

Sandy Cavalaris, who writes the Excel with Monarch blog, describes how to use Excel in conjunction with the Monarch data management product to create a dashboard reporting system (part one and part two). I know very little about Monarch, but it seems like a worthwhile approach to try before dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars in a monolithic ERP system.

Dashboard Advice

I have the following advice to anyone who is developing dashboard reports. You already have Microsoft Excel, so you should try to use it as a dashboard application before investing in expensive and obscure software. Excel can link to local data and to corporate databases, so it can wield the power of large packages with less overhead. Start with Stephen Few’s book on Information Dashboard Design to gain insights into what makes effective data displays. Read Charley Kyd’s web site and e-book to get practical approaches to dashboarding in Excel. Read Jorge Camoes’ archive of dashboard-related posts for more practical insights into Excel dashboarding. Then build and tear down and build again, until you have a display system that is informative and leads to framing good business decisions.

If you simply plot date-related data, you may notice cyclical patterns, but it’s not easy to compare the patterns from, say, year to year.

Using a Cycle Plot, you group the data by month, rather than show it strictly in date order. This allows you to compare months with each other, and also to see how each month has been performing year over year. Charley’s article shows how to plot your data this way rather painlessly.

Charley’s chart and protocol is based on Naomi Robbins’ recent article, Introduction to Cycle Plots, on the Perceptual Edge web site. The Cycle Plot is similar to the Panel Chart, which I cover on my web site:

Stacked Charts With Vertical Separation
Panel Charts with Different Scales
Panel Chart Example: Chart with Vertical Panels
Births by Day of the Year

Kelly O’Day also covers Panel Charts and Cycle Plots on his Process Trends web site. In fact, Kelly may have coined the phrase “panel chart”.

Charley has made a habit of turning good techniques and resources into practical business tools. A few years ago, Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge wrote a book entitled Information Dashboard Design, which explained how to present information in ways which are known to be effective, based on the psychology of cognition and the physiology of vision. Charley combined Stephen’s work with his own background as CIO and produced an ebook called Dashboard Reporting with Excel, along with a set of templates and workbooks that support dashboard reporting. Both are worthwhile resources.