Excel Dashboard
Hatching Insights: Building Excel-ptional Dashboards
This post covers why I decided to make the dashboard in Excel and interactive features I added.
The Why behind the project:
Being a data analyst means having your eggs in all baskets 🥚🧺—yes, you read that right, every single basket! Now the question arises, “But how many baskets do I need?” The answer? It depends, but in this post, I’m naming some of the absolutely essential ones.
Let me introduce myself first. I’m an undergraduate, hustling hard to break into the data industry. I’ve spent countless hours scouring hundreds of job postings (yes, I even have a full-fledged Notion Kanban board for it) to figure out exactly what skills recruiters are looking for. And here’s what I discovered: you need to be an all-rounder. Whether it’s business acumen, statistical and mathematical know-hows, effective communication, or technical prowess in coding languages like Python, R or SQL, every basket counts.
Excel: Despite not being as intricate as SQL or any other programming language, Excel can be used to build dashboards and perform exploratory data analysis on large (but not massive) datasets. Apart from that, it always comes in handy during data cleaning. So, I decided to add one more egg to my languages basket and dive deep into Excel. To my delight, I discovered that Excel can be just as effective as SQL or SAS for creating interactive dashboards and performing robust data analysis.
Interactive Features of the dashboard:
Dynamic Dropdown Menus:
Dropdowns for filtering by country and year
Real-Time Data Updates:
Leveraged Excel functions such as INDEX/ MATCH/LARGE for ranking, SUMIFS for aggregating data with multiple criteria, and HLOOKUP/XLOOKUP for flexible data retrieval. The precise use of absolute and relative cell references ensured that every formula was robust and easily scalable.
Conditional Formatting:
Used conditional formatting to highlight key metrics and trends
You can access the full Excel workbook through the link provided:
