Microsoft Excel Dashboards and Reports

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The Authors of Excel Dashboards and Reports PDF

Michael Alexander and John Walkenbach are the editors of Excel Dashboards and Reports second Edition PDF Book

About the Authors of Excel Dashboards and Reports

Mike Alexander is a Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD) and author of several books on advanced business analysis using Microsoft Access and Excel.

He has more than 15 years of experience consulting and developing Microsoft Office solutions. Michael has been named a Microsoft MVP for his ongoing contributions to the Excel community.

In his spare time, he runs a free tutorial site, www.datapigtechnologies.com, where he shares basic Access and Excel tips with the Office community

Excel Dashboards and Reports PDF Free download.

John Walkenbach is a bestselling Excel author who has published more than 50 books on spreadsheets. He lives amid the saguaros, javelinas, rattlesnakes, bobcats, and Gila monsters in southern Arizona — but the critters are mostly scared away by his clawhammer banjo playing. For more information, Google him.

Main Contents of Excel Dashboards and Reports PDF

• Getting Started with Excel Dashboards
• Introducing Charts into Your Dashboards
  
• Advanced Dashboarding Concepts
• Pivot Table Driven Dashboards
• Working with the Outside World

Introduction to Excel Dashboards and Reports PDF

Business intelligence (BI) is what you get when you analyze raw data and turn that information into actionable knowledge. (Excel Dashboards and Reports by Michael Alexander )

BI can help an organization identify cost-cutting opportunities, uncover new business opportunities, recognize changing business environments, identify data anomalies, and create widely accessible reports.

The BI concept is overtaking corporate executives who are eager to turn impossible amounts of data into useful knowledge.

Excel Dashboards and Reports PDF Free download.

As a result of this trend, software vendors who focus on BI and build dashboards are coming out of the woodwork. (Excel Dashboards and Reports by Michael Alexander )

Dashboards are ideal mechanisms for delivering this targeted information in a graphical, user-friendly form. New consulting firms touting their BI knowledge are popping up virtually every week.

And even the traditional enterprise solution providers like Business Objects and SAP are offering new BI capabilities presented in a dashboard format.

So maybe you’ve been hit with dashboard fever? Or maybe you’re holding this Excel Dashboards and Reports by Michael Alexander book because someone is asking you to create BI solutions (that is, create a dashboard) in Excel.

Although many IT managers would scoff at the thought of using Excel as a BI tool to create a dashboard, Excel is inherently part of the enterprise-BI-tool portfolio. (Excel Dashboards and Reports by Michael Alexander )

Whether IT managers are keen to acknowledge it or not, most of the data analysis and reporting has done in business today is done by using a spreadsheet program.

We see several significant reasons to use Excel as the platform for your dashboards and reports. They are as follows:

1. Familiarity with Excel: If you work in corporate America, you’re conversant in the language of Excel. You can send even the most seasoned senior vice-president an Excel-based presentation and trust he’ll know what to do with it.
   With an Excel dashboard, your users spend less time figuring how to use the tool and more time viewing the data.
2. Built-in flexibility: With most enterprise dashboards, the ability to analyze the data outside of the predefined views is either disabled or unavailable.
   In Excel, features such as pivot tables, drop-down lists, and other interactive controls (such as a checkbox) don’t lock your audience into one view. And because an Excel workbook contains multiple worksheets, the users have space to add their own data analysis as needed.
3. Rapid development: Using Excel to build your own dashboards can liberate you from assorted resource and time limitations from within an organization. With Excel, you can develop dashboards faster and adapt more quickly to changing business requirements.
4. Powerful data connectivity and automation capabilities: Excel is not the toy application some IT managers make it out to be. With its own native programming language and its robust object model, Excel can help to automate certain processes and even connect with various data sources. With a few advanced techniques, your dashboard can practically run on its own.
5. Little to no incremental costs: Not all of us can work for multi-billion dollar companies that can afford enterprise-level reporting solutions.
   In most companies, funding for new computers and servers is limited, let alone funding for expensive dashboard software packages.
   For those companies, Excel is frankly the most cost-effective way to deliver key business reporting tools without compromising too deeply on usability and function.
   

Excel contains so many functions and features that it’s difficult to know where to start. Enter your humble authors, spirited into your hands via this Excel Dashboards and Reports by Michael Alexander book.

Here we show you how you can turn Excel into your own personal BI tool. With a few fundamentals and some of the new BI functionality, Microsoft has included in this latest version of Excel.

Excel Dashboards and Reports PDF Free download.

You can go from reporting data with simple tables to creating meaningful dashboards sure to wow everyone.

What You Need to Know about Excel Dashboards and Reports

The goal of this Excel Dashboards and Reports by Michael Alexander book is to show you how to leverage Excel functionality to build and manage better presentations. (Excel Dashboards and Reports by Michael Alexander )

Each chapter in this book provides a comprehensive review of Excel functions and features and the analytical concepts that will help you create better reporting components — components that can be used for both dashboards and reports.

Excel Dashboards and Reports PDF Free download.

As you move through this Excel Dashboards and Reports by Michael Alexander book, you’ll be able to create increasingly sophisticated components. After reading this book, you’ll be able to:

1. Analyze large amounts of data and report those results in a meaningful way. 
2. Get better visibility into data from different perspectives. 
3. Add interactive controls to show various views. 
4. Automate repetitive tasks and processes. 
5. Create eye-catching visualizations. 
6.  Create impressive dashboards and What-If analyses. 
7.  Access external data sources to expand your message

Download Excel Dashboards and Reports 2nd Edition by Michael Alexander and John Walkenbach easily in PDF format for free.