Wiley Excel 2007 Dashboards & Reports For Dummies 978-0-470-22814-2 ユーザーズマニュアル

In This Chapter

Comparing dashboards to reports

Getting started on the right foot

Dashboarding best practices

I

n his song, “New York State of Mind,” Billy Joel laments the differences
between California and New York. In this homage to the Big Apple, he

implies a mood and a feeling that comes with thinking about New York. I
admit it’s a stretch, but I’ll to extend this analogy to Excel — don’t laugh.

In Excel, the differences between building a dashboard and creating standard
table-driven analyses are as great as the differences between California and
New York. To approach a dashboarding project, you truly have to get into the
dashboard state of mind. As you’ll come to realize in the next few chapters,
dashboarding requires far more preparation than standard Excel analyses. It
calls for closer communication with business leaders, stricter data modeling
techniques, and the following of certain best practices. It’s beneficial to have
a base familiarity with fundamental dashboarding concepts before venturing
off into the mechanics of building a dashboard.

In this chapter, you get a solid understanding of these basic dashboard con-
cepts and design principles as well as what it takes to prepare for a dash-
boarding project.

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