Excel BI and Dashboards in 7 Days: Build Interactive Dashboards for Powerful Data Visualization and Insights

Everyone thinks of Excel differently, and its full potential is often untapped. Businesses tend to decide to invest heavily in proper BI tools, perhaps wrongfully assuming that Excel has a minimal role in that industry.

Excel can be used effectively to collect, refresh, transform, and visualize your data in beautiful and eye-catching ways. This book covers building those skills and unlocking Excel and your potential in just seven days. The book explores the process of cleaning your data to ensure accuracy, using formulas to enhance and prepare the same for PivotTables. It will also help you understand how to use data visualization to create clear charts to communicate insights effectively and construct interactive dashboards for user exploration, including elements like slicers and timelines. The book also dives into discovering design principles for easy-to-understand dashboards, while gaining knowledge on maintaining and updating them for ongoing usability.

Understanding the full power behind Excel will allow you to improve your spreadsheet game and prove that you can do it all with one industry standard tool and this book.

KEY FEATURES

• A deep dive into dashboarding in Excel, understanding the opportunities and limitations of Excel as a BI solution.
• Guiding the reader to understand more about data requests and the stakeholders that make them.
• Transform data into clear information and actionable insights for informed decisions.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• Better spreadsheet control using conditional formatting, data validation, useful shortcuts, and flash file.
• How to aggregate your data with PivotTables, basic aggregation formula, and advanced aggregation formula.
• Slicers, data validation dropdowns to control the page and getting your end user control.
• Visualize your data by drawing a chart, making it look good, and building a dashboard page.
• Power Query data refreshing and best practices for maintaining your work.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

This book is for everyone who wants to be a powerful user of Excel, finance teams, sales and marketing teams, MIS Analysts, BI aspirants, and all those who work with Excel sheets daily and want to refine that skill set into something more practical.

About the Author

Jared Poli is an enthusiastic designer of BI solutions and data analytics with ten years of experience in the industry.

He has worked with a wide range of stakeholders across all levels of seniority and has extensive experience in tailoring solutions to meet that range of demands. He has knowledge utilizing a skill set built up of many of the popular BI tools in the market today. He has years of experience as an Excel expert, using it to deliver everything from dashboards to automation tools. He has delivered function-wide Excel training to colleagues of various technical backgrounds. He is effective at tailoring training to the skill level and proficiency of the trainees, maximizing the understanding and value takeaway for what is delivered.

Jared is passionate about Excel and considers it the kind of tool anybody can use, being flexible enough to do just about anything you can imagine. For example, he’s used it for budget tracking and baby planning and even made a mastermind and sudoku generator!