If I would have banged my head against the wall each time someone asked me to recreate an existing spreadsheet in a dashboard, I would have had a permanent headache. And believe me, I’m pretty hard-headed.
Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand why people come with such requests. You are just getting used to dashboards, the new way of reporting within your organisation, and you couldn’t be happier. For a while now your data is being refreshed regularly, the reports are much faster, you can easily filter on specific subsets of your data, you can easily share the report with everyone, etc (I feel another blog coming up!). But you’ve always worked with your convenient spreadsheet to visualise your data. So, let’s recreate your spreadsheet in a dashboard, as you’ve always done!
Well, that’s a bit odd. You do adore everything that makes dashboards so efficient and you trust your BI specialist, but you’re asking for the same end result. Dashboards are not just awesome because of the nerdy background. The new visualisation options lead to plenty of new opportunities as well. So you should not ask your BI nerd “Can you recreate my spreadsheet”, but rather it should be “This spreadsheet has always been very useful to me. Can you make it even more useful?” And that, that’s a question we like to hear. Cause yep, I’m now speaking on behalf of all my fellow BI friends, we certainly can. Let me list a few advantages of “not just recreating your spreadsheet”
Add trends: Of course you can add charts to your spreadsheet to show trends. But the trend charts in dashboarding tools are better in every single way. There are many different charts, allowing you to find the perfect fit for your purpose. This in combination with the possibility to filter your dashboard on a subset of the data, or to drill down, will become a very powerful asset for your decision making!
Drill down: Yes, I just mentioned it. Would you like to see how much toilet paper you’ve used per year, quarter, month, day? Or would you like to see the amount of toilet paper used per country, state, province, city? You just need one chart or table and you can see it all. With just one click you will see your data aggregated at a higher/lower level. This beats every pivot table.
Visualisation: Dashboards can be eye candy, even if you try to recreate a table. I hate to say this, but people are superficial. Yes, you are too. If something looks nice, people are more prone to believe the content and have a closer look at it. So give your tables a touch of yourself and simply copy the layout to all other tables.
Flag data: It’s so much easier to add some colour coding or other flags to your tables. Do you need to flag anything below or above a certain number? This allows you and your colleagues to see any interesting data straight away! This in combination with the automated refresh... Oh my god. (By the way, does your organisation have proper KPI’s defined? You should!)
Year to something values: Spreadsheets also allow you to calculate year to date, year on year etc. values. But I’ve never seen this being done properly and therefore it’s mostly left out of any spreadsheet. But in dashboards? Piece of cake for your local BI hero! Monitoring your progress has never been this easy.
But what if you would still like to have a tab with the raw numbers to check the correctness of the data? Or you need to export your data because you need to send it by mail? No problem. That’s a very valid point and a table for exporting your data can easily be added to the dashboard as well. But please get used to the new possibilities that visualisation has to offer!
These are just a few examples about how to visualise the same data, more efficiently. All those new features require a slightly different way of thinking and the data needs to be built up in a different way. With the “old-fashioned” spreadsheet way of thinking, you’re missing out on a lot of new possibilities. That’s one of the many reasons why your organisation needs a BI specialist.
Don’t know where to start? Are you curious if dashboards can benefit your organisation? Do you just want to have a chat because you feel lonely? So do we! Reach out to IMBII and let’s see how we can move your organisation forward.
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