Dashboards

Dashboards are useful for presenting data in a form that is more useful to stakeholders than the raw data itself. It’s very easy with spreadsheets to organize data and compute the totals, averages, counts, etc, which are typically presented in dashboards.

Providing dashboard data to stakeholders by sharing or emailing spreadsheets is often problematic for the same reasons discussed in the calculators section, such as ensuring privacy, security, and “one version of the truth”.

Using data validations to make “drop-down” lists in conjunction with built-in spreadsheet functions such as SUMIFS() and COUNTIFS() it’s easy to build interactive dashboards, such as the fictional Office Products Sales dashboard below that allow stakeholders to drill down into the data.

(To learn more about how to create interactive dashboards such as the one above, download the spreadsheet used to create it, and check out our tutorial on summarizing data with NExS.)

Case Studies

Super Tuesday North Carolina Election Results

The Raleigh News & Observer had a big challenge for Super Tuesday. The challenge was to create an online dashboard that would provide the results for all 397 primary races taking place in North Carolina, starting at 8:00 PM and updating all through the evening as precincts reported. The data source was a text file from the State Board of Elections with 343,537 rows - one for each race, candidate and precinct. It was critical that the process of downloading the new data and updating the dashboard would be fast and simple so that frequent updates were manageable, and that the election results would be presented to readers in a form was aesthetically pleasing and could be intuitively navigated. Existing data presentation and business intelligence tools at their disposal could not meet these requirements. They were either to cumbersome to update when new data was downloaded, or didn’t meet the high bar they had set for user experience. The solution was a pair of linked Excel spreadsheets - one which would import and summarize the massive data set from the Board of Elections, and a second which links to the summarized data for all 397 races and provides the layout for the dashboard. Since Excel makes it very easy to sort and organize data, it was straightforward to build a NExS app that met all of the newspaper’s requirements.

Super Tuesday (3/3/2020) North Carolina Election Results