Agenda

Introduction to Dashboards

• What is a dashboard?
• Types
• Value of automation process

Overview of 7-Step Automation Process

• Designing the dashboard
• Setting up the spreadsheet
• Building drop-down menus
• Building the data table
• Building charts
• Finalizing alignment
• Printing or PDFing

Live Demo of Automation Process

Materials

Attendees will receive:

• The 90-minute live webinar, or a streamed recording
• A 3-page guide that spells out the automation process in more detail
• The primary dataset used during the webinar (population statistics for Virginia counties)
• A secondary dataset that you can explore on your own (an organization’s social media statistics)

Examples

Trying to decide whether this automation process is ideal for your projects? Check out these examples.

Creating data tables for your appendices:

Creating one-page summaries with a mix of charts and text:

Level

Intermediate to advanced spreadsheet and data analysis knowledge. I suggest watching a few of my free tutorials prior to the webinar: www.annkemery.com/excel

Target Audience

Social scientists who need to churn out a series of visual reports, e.g., one snapshot per school, district, program, initiative, grantee, etc.

What People are Saying

“I did get a lot out of the webinar, but the support materials and videos make all the difference.  And it’s smart and generous of you to give us access to the webinar for review. You are offering something very special. I’m feel pretty skilled with analyzing, interpreting, and presenting data, but I’m going to be able to bump my skill set up to a whole new level with your help.”

Great webinar with @AnnKEmery on using dropdowns menus in #Excel for multi-site dashboards! Excited to put her tips in to practice. #eval

— Jessica Weitzel (@usefuleval) November 24, 2014

Put @AnnKEmery‘s Excel Dashboards via Dropdown Menus webinar into practice today. Game changer. http://t.co/IVDztQaKdp #eval #excel — Jessica Weitzel (@usefuleval) December 18, 2014

Thanks @AnnKEmery for the dashboard webinar today! Def something I’ll need to keep practicing!…excited for more!! http://t.co/i9d6rA1bah

— Nick Visscher (@nickvisscher) November 24, 2014

Excited for upcoming excel dashboard webinar! @AnnKEmery http://t.co/T2GZGUUsoa — Spotlight Impact LLC (@spotlightimpact) November 14, 2014

Purchase the Recording and Accompanying Materials

This webinar has finished, but you can still purchase the recording and materials. Contact me.

Draft 1

At the meeting: “Which metrics would we include? Maybe stats about the number of members, number of events held, brown bag topics….?”

Look closely, can you see the small multiples blog post peeking through on the other side of the page? Start with sketching and your life will be 1,000,000 times easier.

Draft 2

Revisiting the initial brainstorming, about a week later: “I’ll need a header section, and a 2-sentence description of the organization, and maybe a list of Board members, and some demographic charts on members, and something about our brown bags and happy hours. And of course we’ll need contact information at the bottom… Okay this seems easy… Is this too easy…? Sketching is always the easiest step, right…?”

Draft 3

“The ‘Who We Are’ section is looking huge. Which topics do I even have data on? And how many charts can I realistically fit in that tiny space? I’d really love to keep this summary to just one page… And how would I actually visualize that stuff under ‘What We Do’ …  hmm … maybe a graphic timeline? … okay I’ll go with that for now…”

Draft 4

“This will be so easy, I’ll just stick these charts and text boxes into a PowerPoint slide so that I have plenty of control over moving the various objects around on the screen… I’ll just set my slide dimensions to a portrait layout… This’ll be printed in black and white and shared online in color PDFs, so I can use some color, but I better stick with a pretty simple color scheme – probably the burgundy from our logo and that’s it. There’s some yellow too, but there’s no way that yellow will show up good when this is photocopied in black and white… Darn copying and pasting charts from Excel into PowerPoint is such a drag, I wish there was some way around it…”

Draft 5

“Oh geez, oh course there’s a shortcut that helps me avoid copying and pasting charts back and forth from Excel into PowerPoint – I’ll just create the entire report inside Excel. Just like I often do… Why didn’t I think of that 20 minutes ago?! … C’mon Ann, maybe you shouldn’t be working on this ‘just for fun’ project at 2am…”

Final Report

Three weeks later, revisiting the Excel-based summary: “Vertical text boxes? What was I thinking?! … And those burgundy boxes around each section… They seemed fine earlier but now they seem way too dark… I want the headers to stick out, so let me increase the font a little and add light gray lines instead of burgundy boxes.”

Want to view the full report? Download the PDF.

Evaluator in the DC area? Join the Washington Evaluators and I for brown bags and socializing in the new year. Thanks for a great 2014!