Dashboards typically come from the Business Intelligence world. Updating the operational DB come from the transactional world. Why not connect the two for a full insight-to-action experience?

In a project I delivered this week to a new customer in Australia, it hit me that I have combined dashboards with updating data records for long time. Intuitively, as I envision the customer’s line of thought, I usually allow the user to cross the lines and open an update screen straight from a dashboard.

What’s the Big Deal?

In the traditional data-centric approach to business information...

Creating a live dashboard is a skill combining data sourcing and staging (arrangement of the data to serve the dashboard elements), queries (typically SQL, or smart Excel functions), visual design, user experience and layout, and business requirements to be fulfilled. My students learn how to create beautiful, business dashboards.

I recently offered an answer on Quora to the question: How can you create a live dashboard with Excel for your clients? After submitting my answer, I thought my Blog readers may benefit from this as well, so here it is :)

Consider the following dashboard:

This is...