What is the purpose and difference between Power BI and Excel VBA * When to use what * Or maybe you can use both? * Here is my take on the role Power BI and Excel VBA can play in your setting.

Lucien, one of the professional Excel VBA experts following my Blog and courses approached me this week with this question.

He noted a shift from Excel to Power BI in his workplace and asked about my point of view on the two.

Lucien mentioned that he is more of an “Excel/VBA person” and that the Power BI reports seem slow and not interactive.

What a great question to call for a Blog post!

How should a dashboard strategy be conceptualized? How do you translate the accumulated data into an effective business compass for the decision maker? Start your journey here

We planned our Dashboards and prepared the data. We’re now ready for the artistic magic: the visual effect and user experience. This is the focus of today’s Blog post, the last in this “all Dashboards” 4-articles series. If you missed the previous parts, start here.

Start with Observation

Now is the time to take the blueprint of our Dashboard we sketched when we planned our Dashboards layout,...

How should a dashboard strategy be conceptualized? How do you translate the accumulated data into an effective business compass for the decision maker? Start your journey here

After we have finished all the preparations for our Dashboard in the previous Blog post of this Dashboards’ Guide series, we’re now ready to start implementing our Dashboard in Excel.

Preparing the Data for the Dashboards

A good data staging serving our Dashboards must be very efficient, to quickly refresh the Dashboards. This implies that we need to carefully strike a balance across all resources required...

How should a dashboard strategy be conceptualized? How do you translate the accumulated data into an effective business compass for the decision maker? Start your journey here

In the previous Blog post we understood the main aspects and types of Dashboards. In this second of a 4-part Blog post, we start preparing ourselves for the much-anticipated Dashboard.

The Big Picture

The place to start is the business requirements analysis document, we prepared (or received) before we planned and implemented the application. The Dashboards’ elements should already be described right there.

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How should a dashboard strategy be conceptualized? How do you translate the accumulated data into an effective business compass for the decision maker? Start your journey here

The importance of Dashboards

Dividing information systems’ role into two main focus areas, we have the operational processes on one hand (OLTP) and the analytics on the other (OLAP).

Considering the ultimate goal of supporting and driving the business, OLTP systems streamline the daily work, govern the processes and control the data as it is being accumulated in the database. OLAP solutions are tasked with...

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...