Free Excel Dashboards

Dashboard Spy Topic: Excel Dashboard Example.
Excel dashboard guru Chandoo offers a download of an excellent infographic he created using Excel 2010. Did you know that Excel 2010 has sparklines? Take a look at this awesome excel dashboard done in an infographic poster style.
Visit his post to download the excel file: Sachin Tendulkar Statistics [...]

a

For more information visit Excel Infographics

Dashboard Spy Topic: 2010 Winter Olympics Scorecard from iDashboards.
The dashboard gurus at business intelligence dashboard software vendor, iDashboards, are continuing their tradition of helping fans of the Olympic Games track the medal counts of the competing countries.
Take a look at this dashboard screenshot. Use this link to try out the interactive iDashboards Winter Olympics Dashboard for [...]

a

For more information visit iDashboards Winter Olympics Dashboard

Dashboard Topic: Excel School
The dirty little secret in business intelligence dashboards is that sometimes (and actually more often than you think!), Microsoft Excel is a perfectly fine choice of platform for a business dashboard.
And the even dirtier secret is that we business intelligence gurus are less adept at Excel than we should be.
Is it [...]

a

For more information visit Go Back to School for Excel

This year, while saying “Happy New Year!”, I was also thinking “Good riddance!”. Face it, the year was a really rough one for many of you Dashboard Spy readers. Corporate earnings were horrible, revenues fell off a cliff, I.T. budgets got slashed, and many, many smart, hardworking people were downsized.
I personally attended goodbye lunch [...]

a

For more information visit 7 Ways to Remain Relevant for Business Intelligence in 2010

Dashboard Example: Xcelsius TCO Dashboard

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a popular financial estimate used to assess costs (both direct and indirect costs). Typically, TCO analyzes the financial impact of deploying information technology (to take an example) over the entire life cycle. Depending on the IT deployment, factors such as the following are accounted for:

• End-user computer Hardware purchase costs
• Software license purchase costs
• Hardware and Software Implementation / deployment costs
• Hardware warranties and maintenance costs
• Software license tracking costs
• Operations Infrastructure Costs
• Infrastructure (floor space) costs
• Cost for electricity and cooling
• Network hardware and software costs
• Server hardware and software costs
• Testing costs
• Cost to upgrade or scalability
• IT Personnel costs
• “C” Level Management Time costs
• Backup and Recovery Process costs
• Costs associated with failure or outage
• Diminished performance incidents (i.e. users having to wait)
• Costs of security breaches (in loss of reputation and recovery costs)
• Technology training costs of users and IT staff.
• Audit costs
• Insurance costs
• Replacement costs
• Migration costs
• Decommissioning costs

The following example of an Xcelsius TCO dashboard is from myxcelsius.com, a blog dedicated to Xcelsius Dashboards.

The following is just a static screenshot. You can click on the dashboard thumbnail to enlarge the image, but visit the dashboard itself to try out all the interactive elements. There are plenty of controls that you can use to model total cost of ownership.

Xcelsius TCO Dashboard Calculates Total Cost of Ownership

Tags: Business Objects Xcelsius Dashboard, TCO dashboards, dashboard example

Reference: Have you seen this new book on Business Objects Xcelsius 2008?

Crystal Xcelsius For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

For more information visit Xcelsius TCO Dashboard

The iPhone interface offers advances in information resolution. It “elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information – too often leaving users with “Where am I?” puzzles.”

Edward Tufte walks us through how the iPhone accomplishes this in his post and video published earlier this year titled “iPhone Interface Design”.

His basic message is that the Apple iPhone has great value as an interface because of the higher information resolution available to the end user. Computer information debris reduces information visualization resolution and steals content space away from the user. Edward Tufte lauds Apple’s approach of having the controls go away leaving the user to control the information right off the page by tapping and swiping.

When you visit the page, you’ll find that a large video will load. It’s worth the wait. Here are some screen captures from the video.

This screenshot shows an image on Edward Tufte’s iPhone gallery. It is an image with sparklines. Click on the image to enlarge it for more detail.

Edward Tufte shows an image of sparkline charts on his iPhone

In this screen capture, you can see Edward Tufte’s finger as he swipes the screen to move the image.

Edward Tufte moves the iphone image of sparklines

Here is the stock market page from the iPhone. Note the level of the Dow Jones!

Stock Market Page on the Apple iPhone

Here is an updated screenshot from the Dashboard Spy’s iPhone:

Screenshot from The Dashboard Spy’s iPhone

Don’t be fooled by all the green. Stocks are bouncing off their lows from the other day when the Dow Jones went below 8000!

For more information visit Edward Tufte on the iPhone Interface