Dashboard Design

Quick reference

• 00:04 So, now we have many of the elements that we need to assemble our dashboard.
• 00:08 We have our PivotTables and our PivotCharts, and
• 00:12 we also have our calculations ready to go.
• 00:14 So, the final stage of building this dashboard is really to
• 00:18 start thinking about how we want to design our dashboard.
• 00:21 Now, the decisions that you make when it comes to the actual look and
• 00:25 feel of your dashboard might be determined very much by branding guidelines
• 00:29 that you have at your company.
• 00:31 Maybe you have to use specific colors, maybe you need to have your company
• 00:35 logo somewhere on there, maybe you need to use specific fonts.
• 00:40 These are all things you need to consider when you're putting together your
• 00:43 dashboard.
• 00:44 And really dashboard design is entirely up to you.
• 00:47 And I would say that if you're looking for some really good inspiration when it
• 00:51 comes to how to design your dashboard, what colors to use, what layout.
• 00:55 Then jumping onto Pinterest and just typing in Excel dashboards is a really
• 01:00 great way of seeing some excellent examples of Excel dashboards which will
• 01:04 hopefully inspire you when you're creating your own.
• 01:08 Now another little tip when it comes to designing your dashboard.
• 01:11 I always like to create what we call a wireframe and
• 01:14 I've got an example of a wireframe just here.
• 01:18 Now I've done mine in Excel,
• 01:19 this could be something that you simply sketch out in a notebook.
• 01:23 And really all the wireframe is therefore is to really just sort of get a general
• 01:27 idea in your head as to which elements you're going to add onto your dashboard
• 01:31 and where you're going to place those elements.
• 01:33 For example, here I've got a little header sketched out at the top, so
• 01:37 that might be where I have the title of the dashboard and maybe a logo.
• 01:42 Underneath that I then have summary statistics.
• 01:45 So I told you that we were going to create summary statistics out of those
• 01:49 calculations that we did in the last lesson.
• 01:52 So we want to make sure that we leave a place at the top for those.
• 01:55 Underneath that I might then want to add some slicers so
• 01:58 that my dashboard is easy to filter, so I'm going to leave a gap for that.
• 02:02 And then I have, effectively placeholders for all of my different pivot charts.
• 02:07 And of course, this is simply a rough guide, once you get your charts
• 02:10 onto the dashboard, you might decide you want to rearrange them.
• 02:13 It's absolutely fine, but it's a good idea to have an idea in your head as to how
• 02:17 this dashboard is going to look.
• 02:19 The next thing is then to consider the colors, the fonts,
• 02:22 and the overall style that you want to use for your dashboard.
• 02:26 Now I've decided to go with a darker dashboard theme this time.
• 02:29 If you remember when we were creating all of our pivot charts,
• 02:32 I was choosing the darker chart style each time.
• 02:34 Now, I'm sure you're going to have a lot more time put into thinking about
• 02:38 the design of your dashboard than I have here.
• 02:41 I've really just got this basic dashboard design up on the screen, so
• 02:44 you can see how this looks when we pull everything together.
• 02:46 Now let's just run through the different changes that I've already made to this
• 02:50 spreadsheet so you understand how to do this.
• 02:53 Now the first thing I did was I removed the grid lines from my worksheet, so
• 02:57 on the View ribbon in the show group, just deselect grid lines.
• 03:01 I then simply pressed Ctrl A to select all cells, and
• 03:04 I changed the background fill of these cells to a dark gray color.
• 03:08 I then simply added a text box to hold the title.
• 03:13 I changed the background fill of cell A1 to make that pink and
• 03:17 then I just added an icon that's available within Excel.
• 03:20 If you're not sure where your icons are, if you go to the Insert ribbon and into
• 03:24 Illustrations, you have a whole gallery of different icons that you can use.
• 03:28 So I just literally typed in globe and I chose this icon just here.
• 03:32 I then simply started to mark out where those high-level summary statistics
• 03:37 are going to go.
• 03:38 So once again, I've just added a shape, this time a rounded rectangle.
• 03:43 I've removed the background fill, I've given it a green outline and
• 03:47 I've also given it an outline effect.
• 03:50 So if we go to shape format, you can see here, Shape fill is set to No Fill.
• 03:56 Shape outline is green, and
• 03:58 then I've added a glow shape effect to get this nice glowy box.
• 04:03 And these headings in here again are just simply text boxes.
• 04:07 So nothing too complex there when it comes to the design of this dashboard so far.
• 04:12 Now, when we bring all of the dashboard elements together,
• 04:15 I'm going to pull in the high level statistics into these boxes at the top.
• 04:19 I've marked out another area below, this is where my slices are going to go, and
• 04:23 then underneath here, this is where we're going to place our charts.
• 04:27 So this is the start of a really nice dashboard design and
• 04:30 this is only really limited by the extent of your imagination.
• 04:33 You don't have to be the most amazing designer in the world to
• 04:36 create a dashboard that looks really nice.
• 04:38 So in the next lesson, we're going to bring everything together.
• 04:41 We're going to pull in our pivot charts, we're going to add some slicers and
• 04:46 add the high level key statistics at the top.
• 04:49 And then I'm going to show you how easy it is to update your dashboard if more data
• 04:53 is added into your source data.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.