Pushing the limits of Excel’s visual design features
Using design to make spreadsheets a bit more exciting
I’m a dashboard guy. The kind of person that has always dreamed of having my own minority report style command center.
The moment I had my own blog and social media accounts I put together an external monitor with GA stats and social media performance on it.
Eventually I co-founded a media monitoring startup and got to work as a product manager building dashboards and command centers for a handful of fortune 500 companies. In short, it was a ton of fun.
But, I learned that it’s HARD to make these. Like really really hard. If you want data from multiple sources, calculated, aggregated and in real-time you’re going to pay BIG bucks (easily $100k+). You’re also going to need a team of developers and have to pay maintenance fees to keep it up and running.
My journey seemed like it was coming to a close when that startup was acquired and I found myself traveling long-term around Asia with my fiance.
But it wasn’t over quite yet. To keep myself productive I took on a handful of smaller and less complex Data Studio and Excel dashboard projects like this (apologies if this embed takes a long time to load):
I quickly learned that the fields of BI, Analytics, Data Science etc are in desperate need of basic design training. It also made me realize that having even rudimentary design skills was a HUGE advantage.
My new side hobby was jazzing up Excel reports. Anybody who works with Excel knows that the reports tend to be painfully dry and not very visually engaging. I think this is a big reason that Excel has a reputation for being a fairly unexciting system to work with.
I’m here to say that this reputation is not deserved. Excel can be straight-up beautiful. It has almost all the visual design features found in powerpoint and a ton of flexibility for building exciting visualizations.
My evidence? I built both of these in Excel using nothing but the standard features (no VBA, no plugins, etc.).
It might seem counter-intuitive but you can absolutely treat an Excel sheet like a powerpoint slide. Here are a handful of features I used in these dashboards that you can easily learn through free tutorials:
- Setting a background image
- Including cell values in a text object or shape
- Understanding shape features like gradients, transparency, outlines, shadows, etc.
- Customizing chart colors
If you have any other questions feel free to ask. I’ll take the time to respond and point you in the right direction.
You can also buy pre-made templates as well (there are tons of them available, just do a quick google search). If you like my style of dashboards you can purchase my Excel Dashboard Toolkit at exceldashboardtemplate.com.
