Creating a Dashboard of Vital Company Statistics
04 June 2010
A dashboard of vital company statistics can provide a snapshot of growth and expenses.
In business, a dashboard is similar to a dashboard you'll find in your car or truck. The vehicle's dashboard holds vital statistics, including your fuel level, speed, GPS system, radio, and other devices that tell you where you're going and how you're doing. Creating a business dashboard for your business will supply the same data. By creating a dashboard, you'll be able to easily view vital statistics of your company's growth, expenses, sales, marketing, human resources, and much more. The idea is to create a data-rich set of controls that allow you to view your company's crucial aspects through a snapshot view. Any company data, however, depends solely on your ability to access, analyze and interpret. After those three steps are completed, you must then communicate the findings with your staff and/or partners, or translate your findings into results. Without the process, data is just a bunch of numbers with no real importance.
Learning how to create a dashboard for your business can work one of two ways. First, you can labor over hundreds of pages of lengthy information until you finally piece together a working dashboard that must be maintained through arduous effort. Or, if you're seeking a viable alternative, you can create a dashboard using Excel as a tool and focus more on your business.If you're in business for yourself, odds are you already know what Excel is. Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet tool that has infinite uses in the business world an easily accessible dashboard being one of them. Even using Excel, your data still has to be structured. Copy paste isn't the way to go here. The best - and easiest - way to go about this is to connect your spreadsheet and data with an external database to create your dashboard. For example, using ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) will allow you to connect your dashboard to a table in Oracle or Access.The advantages here are actually numerous. For starters, your data will be properly attached to the spreadsheet and you'll be able to create a superior dashboard. The programming will take care of the legwork for you. You also have the advantage of speedy calculations as your data changes constantly and needs to be re-entered.You can import data and transfer it to your dashboard using a pivot table or a flat file. A flat file is smaller, but a pivot table is much quicker in calculating.Truthfully, you'll still need to check out some reference sites to see how to go about designing the dashboard properly. There are many ways, some lengthy and some quick, and all of them require knowing a bit about PC language. Using Excel to get started and ODBC for data transfer are two of the most important steps, though, so you'll be ready to start creating the dashboard after getting Excel and opening an account on one of the aforementioned sites.
