Did you know that second only to email, Excel is the tool business users use the most every single day? With over 500 million users, Excel is the #1 reporting and analysis tool used globally. But, many business utilize Excel to analyze data and use other solutions to produce executive dashboards – why waste your time copying and pasting? Just by taking a few additional steps, anyone in your organization could be producing meaningful, real-time executive dashboards within the reporting solution they use every day – Excel.

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With over 500 million users worldwide, Excel is the number one reporting and analysis software and is second only to email in daily use by companies worldwide.  However, many companies do not use this program for anything other than reports and analysis; they choose other solutions for business tools, such as executive dashboards.   By implementing a few simple ideas, you can begin creating interactive executive dashboards in Excel.

Interactive Executive Dashboards in a Familiar Format

Even advanced users are unaware of the many robust functionalities Excel offers.  By learning a few new steps within Excel, anyone in your company can create real-time executive dashboards in Excel, a program they are familiar with and understand.

Real-Time Data

Executives and managers need the most up-to-date information in order to make informed decisions.  By creating a dashboard in Excel, you eliminate the potential for lost data due to copying and exporting information between applications.  When you create a dashboard in Excel, you eliminate redundancy and speed up the transfer of data between parties.

Reading between the Lines

When a problem is being addressed, business decision makers need to know more than just the surface data.  True, they need to see the bottom line numbers, but they also need to see the data used to arrive at those bottom line numbers.  For this reason, reporting and analysis software must be able to “drill down” into the information in order for executives to make an informed decision.  Using a dashboard in Excel allows company officials to “drill down” into the data without leaving the application.

New Features in Excel

Microsoft has added many new features making it much easier to create an executive dashboard in Excel.  With better graphing, formatting and data visualization capabilities, the program provides more than just reporting features.  In addition, data bars, color scales, arrow indicators, spark lines, data slicers and other visually appealing features have been added to increase the aesthetic appearance of the program and make it easier to create an appealing dashboard in Excel.

Creating an executive dashboard in Excel is the best way to reduce the possibility of errors and provide real-time data to the company decision makers using a program that is familiar to almost every business person in the world.  Do you need more help with utilizing Excel reports for your business?  Visit BizNet Software to learn how!

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