Best Practices for Real-World Dashboard Building

Congratulations on making it to the last chapter. By now, you should be eager to deploy your newly acquired skills in the real world. But before you unleash your skills in the corporate world, we have to equip you with the best practices that will help you deliver professional, high-quality work.

The chapter breakdown is as follows:

• Gathering the dashboard requirements
• An overview of different data professionals
• Advantages and limitations of Excel dashboards

You will want to pay very good attention to everything covered in this chapter as your success in the corporate world depends on understanding all the points we will address.

Gathering the dashboard requirements

Your role as a data analyst is usually to support business managers with reporting and analysis that will be used for decision-making. You will typically encounter three categories of dashboards to build:

• Existing established analysis dashboards
• Newly established analysis dashboards
• Ad hoc analysis dashboards

We will go through the three categories and how to handle gathering requirements for them.

Existing established analysis dashboards

The first category comprises dashboards that capture existing standardized analyses that are already in use in the company. This could be monthly financial analyses or monthly sales analyses that have been carried out in one form or another in the company for years already. You are now being given the lofty task of recreating those analyses as a modern dashboard in Excel.

The key characteristics that distinguish this category are that the analyses are being done already and have...

An overview of different data professionals

I had to be careful with the section title, using “An overview of different data professionals” instead of “An overview of all data professionals” because there is no universally agreed upon list of data professionals. However, there are some well-accepted roles that I believe you will come across frequently:

• Data analyst
• Business intelligence (BI) analyst
• Data engineer
• Data scientist
• Database administrator

We will begin to examine each role and I must state that the explanations I give are not exhaustive or to be taken as authoritative. You should take them as my attempt to give a bird’s-eye view of what each role is about.

Data analyst

Twenty years ago, all data professionals fell into two broad categories – data analysts and database administrators. Data analysts are business units supporting professionals building reports and dashboards. In large organizations...

Advantages and limitations of Excel dashboards

Now for the moment of brutal truth: Excel is not always going to be the right tool for dashboards even when it is technically capable.

The advantage of Excel is that it is the favorite of non-technical business managers. Most business managers already are comfortable using Excel and often prefer having reports built for them in Excel. This is a boon for a data analyst with excellent Excel skills.

There are, however, some limitations that Excel has that can mean it is not the right tool for some dashboards. One major limitation is that Excel is not mobile device-friendly. If you need dashboards that must be consumed on the fly by users with their mobile devices, then you will find that Excel does not deliver on that. No one enjoys opening Excel on their mobile phone. It is a guaranteed way of frustrating people. For requirements that include mobile device friendliness, you may want to consider using a self-service BI tool such as...

Summary

This chapter must feel like ice cream compared to the broccoli you have been having the last couple of chapters. Well, you deserved it! You have earned it and I hope you are motivated to put your dashboard-building skills to use.

Don’t forget to properly categorize the dashboard requests you get into one of the three broad categories we covered. You don’t want to use the wro ng requirements-gathering approach, and neither do you want to suffer needlessly on throwaway work.

I hope the explanation of the data professional roles has given you clarity on who to reach out to for some help while you carry out your work.

Lastly, don’t forget that Excel has some limitations that may need to educate your users about before embarking on dashboard building. All the best in your career. May you Excel!