Build a dashboard in 3 simple steps (Google Sheets)

Key Takeaways

hey everybody it's corey from spreadsheet class today i'm going to go over the major steps that are required for building a dashboard in google sheets this video will also serve as an overview of the basic sales dashboard tutorial where i teach you step by step how to build the dashboard that you see here in this video you can find the link to the full tutorial in the description below but again today i'm going to teach you a process that you can follow when building any dashboard which consists of three major steps these three steps that are required for building a dashboard with raw data are importing your data analyzing it or parsing it and then displaying the data visually these are the steps that i have followed for about the past seven years when i create dashboards for online schools and other companies as well so as you watch me building the dashboard in fast motion don't worry about every little step because that's what the full tutorial is for in that video i will go over every formula and every method in great detail but in this video simply focus on the general concepts that i'm teaching and watch them being applied as the dashboard is built so first we need to import our data into google sheets in this case we are using a report that shows revenue earned on sales calls google sheets has an easy option for importing spreadsheet data or you can also copy and paste your data i like to store the raw data on its own tab where the tab is labeled something like import or raw data to keep the sheet organized and easy to read after the dashboard is built you can overwrite the raw data to update the dashboard without having to build a new dashboard each time you have new data the next step is to analyze your data and to stage it or in other words to put it in a format that is ready to connect to your charts so what i'm doing now in the video is formatting my dashboard tab so that the charts have a background that makes them stand out and also to make a spot to display some of the analyzed data i usually prefer to get the dashboard functionality in place before spending a lot of time polishing the colors and other formatting but to make things easier to see in these videos we spend some time on formatting first before analyzing our data so that things are very organized and easy to read so again the second major step is to analyze our data and to put it in a format that we can use for charts what i'm doing now is using formulas to make a variety of calculations based on the raw data that i imported so that i can find the total revenue earned for the entire company as well as for each sales representative and other calculations as well such as the average satisfaction rating i'm analyzing the data and staging it at the same time for this dashboard i chose to stage my data on the same tab that my charts will go on which is the dashboard tab because i want others to be able to view the calculated totals in a table in addition to being able to view the charts but you can also choose to put your calculated totals on a separate tab and you can choose whether or not you want people to view that tab if you analyze and stage your data on a separate tab you can hide the tab and still have charts that pull data from it the final step in building a dashboard is to create data visuals such as charts so here i am creating a scorecard chart to display the total revenue at the top and then i'm using a column chart to display the total revenue earned for each sales representative you can also use other visuals such as conditional formatting or even sparklines which i teach in another dashboard video so we started with plain raw data and we turned it into a professional dashboard that makes the data easy to understand and it makes people's jobs easier so remember the three major steps for creating a dashboard import the data analyze the data and then display it visually if you want to learn how to create this dashboard in detail check out the video linked below as well as the other videos in my dashboards course and if you enjoyed the video please like and subscribe so that you can see more of my videos in the future and also because it really helps my channel reach more people