Spreadsheets Tutorial : Setting up a basic dashboard

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/data-visualization-in-spreadsheets at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- Now that you have seen a completed dashboard and used features to modify the display, let's discuss setting one up! The simple dashboard has user-friendly functions and controls to show only the data you want to report and uses the right visualization to showcase this data. You will explore this further as you set up and add features to your own dashboard, which will allow you to pull data from your main dataset. Using VLOOKUPs and formulas of reference, drilling data down further using data validation, plotting it, highlighting cells that meet certain criteria and using conditional formatting will make this easy. When creating a dashboard, you need to ensure you include the right tools to grab your audience's attention, so start with the outcome in mind and work backward. Before creating a chart, think about what data you are going to use. What is it and where is it located? Is it in the same workbook, pulled from the net, copied, linked, or imported from another source? Depending on where it comes from, the format may need tweaking a little bit, or a lot. It's best practice to get your data in order first as this is the basis for all your visualizations. We will talk more about how you can optimize your data a little later. A smart dashboard displays only the information you want your user to see. You should not display your entire data set. It takes up too much room and draws the reader's eye away from the main message of the visualization because the sheet is too busy. The best way to create a dashboard is to keep your datasets on separate sheets and selectively pull the data you wish to display to create a chart. A formula of reference is the perfect tool for this! It's a simple formula that shows the value of a cell in another