The Dashboard Spy

Excel Dashboard

Topic: Finding Excel Dashboard Examples to Study

A Dashboard Spy reader wrote me to ask how to best go about learning how to use Microsoft Excel for dashboarding. Seems that she got assigned to a departmental dashboard team that was tasked to come up with some KPIs and dashboards.

The requirements seemed straight-forward: decide on the best metrics to display, collect them on a weekly basis, and display them on an excel dashboard.

I advised this budding Dashboard Spy to study some example excel dashboards. She asked me if I could send her some xls files. I told her I would do better than that - I would show her how I use google to find example excel dashboards to learn from.

I ran a quick query and came across this simple auction management excel dashboard:

As you see, it is a simple excel worksheet with a couple of tabs for the various dashboards that an ebay seller may need. The metrics are spread out among the Strategy Dashboard, Product Dashboard, Product Dashboard, Promotion Dashboard and Price Dashboard.

How did I find this excel dashboard? Easy, there is nothing to it - the query I used in google was simply:

digital dashboard filetype:xls

That just tells google to search for the phrase ”digital dashboard” and return results of the file type xls (excel worksheet files). To broaden the search, you can leave out the word digital or replace it with executive, enterprise, kpi, metrics or other business intelligence phrase.  

You can also just use the advanced search feature and toggle between file types to find powerpoints, excel worksheets, word docs, etc.

Anyway, back to the ebay auction management spreadsheet that I found and downloaded. That first dashboard screenshot showed a high level view of key Ebay seller metrics such as Gross Merchandise Sold, Number of Units Sold, Average Selling Price, Conversion Rate, Product Margin (These metrics are gathered under a table labeled Vital Signs). There is also a chart of the Gross Margin for the Month, Traffic Trends and a Customer Service statistics table showing positive and negative ratings growth.

Here is the next tab - the Product Dashboard

As you see, it is a simple excel page showing product details such as rank, sku and title. The product vital signs include Total Units Sold, Average Selling Price, Total Gross Merchandise Sold and the Margin.

Here is the Price Dashboard:

The key bottom line here is the Conversion Rate. Note also the Pricing Strategy column.

Here is the screenshot of the Promotion Dashboard:

This is a key dashboard that shows the top traffic sources. The trend of Total Hits is obviously of key importance, as is the listing of referrers and the number of hits to the listings.

Here is the Placement Dashboard:

The placement dashboard concentrates on tracking channel activity. The overall table summarizes the statistics across all channels while the lower table breaks out the activity among the various channels used.

Tags: Excel dashboard download, Marketing dashboard, excel dashboards