Dashboard skills are in great demand by employers, if you can build great dashboards; it is a valuable skill to have. Even better if you can build them in one of the most widely used pieces of software- Microsoft Excel.

Essentially dashboards are a technique of report used to visually present critical metrics or a data summary to enable quick and effective business decisions. This would be in the same way a car dashboard will display only the main pieces of data needed when driving your car.

There are a variety of dashboards around, you will no doubt have heard of Metrics Dashboard, Business Intelligence Dashboard, Operational Dashboard, Performance Dashboard, the list can go on.

Most users under use and underestimate the power of Microsoft Excel in particular when it comes to creating interactive dashboard reports. With business requirements changing at increasing speed, the need for clarify on business performance and metrics is in strong demand.

Here are some great reasons for using Excel to build your business dashboards:-

My favorite reason for using Excel is its Flexibility.

How many times has a manager asked for extra items, change the timing of the reports and how they look? Excel can easily accommodate these changes and allows users to quickly respond to changing requirements of business. This flexibility can allow users to add extra metrics, add in extra charts, replace graphs, and change emphasis by font size and color. Of course as well as Excel being part of the Office Suite allows ease of interaction between other Office products.

Powerful Analytical Capability.

Excel can handle complex statistical calculations, many of which are in-built as Functions which can then be easily displayed on a dashboard. Help on these in-built functions is readily available from the onscreen help and a walk through of all the elements of the function.

Ease of Distribution.

Excel users are everywhere, and no matter how good any other bespoke piece of software is to build dashboards, there will not be that many people who know how to use it, or be able to open it in a usable format. It is probable that nearly everyone involved in business in some way will at least heard of Excel, if not know something about the software. Team it up with Share Point and you have one powerful publishing platform.

Ease of Use and Learning.

A lot more organizations are realizing the benefits of empowering their own employees to analyze and present their own metrics for their own departments. You do not need an Excel Visual Basic expert to build dashboards when you get to know the correct combinations of worksheet functions.

Easily Identify And Fix Errors.

With Excel it is easy to test for errors in your data, you can search for missing values and highlight values that are unreasonably high or low or that you are just not expecting in your data set. Once you can see your errors you can easily then go about fixing them.

Superb Magazine Quality Reports.

Excel dashboards are not just easy to build, scalable, distributable and easily adaptable, they are also of a really high quality. Not many people take advantage of the full capability of the color schemes, fonts and charting design that is available right within Microsoft Excel.