3 Quick Tricks to Make an Excel Workbook Look Like a Professional Dashboard

So you have created great looking charts, summary graphs, and visually aesthetic tables to summarize your data and highlight the insights and trends, and you are ready to present the results. But when it is time to present your report in Excel, how do you transform Excel from its table-like, tabs-rows-columns-cells database-y feel, to a dashboard feel? You have included the optimised charts, infographics, slicers, customised formatting, but your worksheet still looks like a plain old database. Well, here are three quick steps:

• Disable horizontal scrolling. There's no value in a dashboard for 16,000 columns that spread up until XFD. Your dashboard's value is giving your users a one-glance summary of your data. So keep your user's view focused on the first view, by deactivating the scrollbar that enables scrolling to the right. Go to File > Options > Advanced > Display Options for this workbook

• Hide sheet tabs. You can do this by going to File > Options > Advanced > Display Options for this workbook. If you have multiple views in your dashboard, you can use breadcrumbs, navigation side bars, and navigation buttons to flip through the different tabs in your dashboard.

• Make the workbook open on full screen. This is accomplished by setting up a VBA macro in ThisWorkbook area of your workbook. The detailed instructions are in the guide to opening Excel in full screen mode.