All language subtitles for 1. What is a Dashboard

In this section of the course, we're going to take a look at interactive dashboards.

And we're going to build our own interactive dashboard from scratch.

Now it's worth noting that when it comes to interactive dashboards, they can get very, very complex.

And we're definitely not going to have time in this course to cover all of the methods you can use to

create interactive dashboards.

What I would recommend you do is if you watch these lessons and you think to yourself, Yes, I want

to know more about that.

I highly encourage you to check out our interactive dashboards course, which goes into a lot more detail.

What I really want to do in this section is just really introduce you to the concept of interactive

dashboards and show you how you kind of need to go about putting them together.

So let's start out in this first lesson just by discussing exactly what an interactive dashboard is.

Well, you're pretty much looking at one.

A dashboard is where you gather together all different types of analysis and display them on one worksheet.

And this dashboard as a whole can give people a really good idea as to what's going on in the business.

For example, this is a sales dashboard for the Myriad Group, which is showing sales data from 2018

to 2020.

And the way that I've set this up, we've got some headlines at the top here, which shows us some key

stats at the top of the page, so I can see the products that have got the highest number of orders.

The product that has the highest costs and the most profitable product and information like this can

help us make better business decisions going forward.

Underneath, I have some gross sales figures for the year that is selected in this dropdown box for

each of the different countries.

And then underneath we have some charts which shows various different pieces of data.

So, for example, units sold by country, the number of orders by product.

And then we have a line chart that shows product cost vs. profit.

And the cool thing about this dashboard is that the way that we've set it up is that if we click this

little drop down and switch this to 2019, all of the figures and all of these headlines updates and

pull through the relevant data.

Now, in order to put together a dashboard like this, it requires a number of different skills.

So if we go back to the first tab, we always start off with our raw data set and that should always

be in a table.

Then from this raw data set, I then have a calculations page and this is where I do a lot of my calculations

which feed through to the dashboard.

For example, I can see my calculations here that I need to set up that dropdown box where we select

the year.

I then have the calculations that I need for the column charts.

And then this table houses all the other calculations in the data that we need for the other two charts

that we have on the dashboard.

And then finally, at the bottom, this is what I need for those high level headings at the top of the

page and everything all links through.

So for example, if you take a look at the calculations here for the combo box.

Notice the commonly it says, selected year and I've made a little spelling mistake.

Then it's just quickly change that selected.

Yeah, that's better.

Notice that it says selected year 2019.

Now that's because in the dashboard, currently, I have 2019 selected in this combo box.

But if I was to click this and change it to 2018 and go back to the calculations page.

Notice that this is updated down here so everything links through nicely.

The other three tabs highlighted in blue down here are where I have my different charts that I'm using

on the dashboard.

And again, these have all been created in a way so that when we change the year in this dropdown,

the charts automatically update.

So we've got a few different techniques going on here, and I would also recommend if this is a subject

that you'd like to explore more and you're interested in different ways that you can design interactive

dashboards.

I always recommend jump in onto Pinterest and just having a search for Excel dashboards and taking a

look at some of the amazing designs that other people do.

Now, another point worth noting here is that I've created all of these charts just here, not using

pivot tables or pivot charts.

These are effectively just regular charts.

They're not using pivot data.

Now, a lot of people do use pivot tables and pivot charts on their dashboards, and they'll also use

slices to filter that data.

And if you want to do that, that is absolutely fine using the techniques that we've learned in the

last section.

But I thought we'd do something a little bit different here and use a little dropdown to control the.

To that, we're seeing on this dashboard.

So you're going to get to learn another skill as well, and that is using things like combo boxes.

So over the next couple of lessons, we are going to build out this dashboard.

It is pretty intense.

And if you find it a bit much, I would recommend just watching it a few times and going through it

slowly.

But this is what we're aiming for.

Let's get started.