Create Excel Dynamic HR DASHBOARD - Part 4 DASHBOARD CANVAS PREP

In PART 4 of how to create a dashboard in Excel, I demonstrate how you organise and prepare a clean canvas for the dashboard which will receive all your charts and slicers, which we'll cover in later videos. Having a clean design and clear page breaks are imperative for presenting your reports well. The work you do here will pay dividends later!

I guide you through slowly and clearly, addressing the common issues you'll encounter along the way. I show you how to create graph-paper like squares to align things to, arrange the overall layout, format the background, sort page margins to ensure it can print or be PDF'd to one page, create the title area, and then the shapes and text boxes for the various chart graphics. I'll also show you how to create icons to supplement the design.

It's a long-ish video but this stuff takes time to do right and be assured you can learn dashboards within a day. You can check out the chapters to skip to particular content of interest.

For this Excel dashboard, I've used an HR dataset from the fictional company 'Dunder Mifflin', which you may know from 'The Office' TV show. I think it's good to use familiar and fun data while learning, rather than the generic or bland 'dummy data' used in such tutorials. I find it more engaging and the concepts seem to flow easier.

Download the follow-along dataset should you wish to learn by creating this exact thing from my blog below. But using the concepts and learning, you'll be able to create your own dashboard from ANY dataset!

https://excelattheoffice.com/2024/04/...

This is video 4 in my mini-series all about how to make stunning and dynamic dashboards of charts and graphs in Excel. Video 1 gave you an introduction and demo of the HR dashboard I've created. In Video 2 I showed you how to set up the worksheets and refine the data with formatting and calculations. Video 3 went deep on creating the pivot tables to summarise the raw data. Stay tuned for the next in this mini-series, where we'll get into the front end dashboard itself!

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Chapters

0:00 - Intro, overview of steps
2:20 - Create 'graph paper' view
3:50 - Hide all unused columns and rows
5:20 - Format background sections
7:50 - Page layout, breaks and margins for 1-page print
9:25 - Create title area, alignment hack, text, shapes
16:08 - Insert and format icons, links
19:00 - Prep canvas for charts, shapes, subtitles
25:00 - Recap of notes and pointers
27:20 - Make rounded corners consistent size
27:50 - Preview of next vids, close and outro

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See my other videos or blog with more excel tips:

https://excelattheoffice.com/blog

I hope you've found this helpful. Please like and subscribe for more handy content. I do this around a day job at at own expense (the main one being £300 per year website fees), so any contributions are most welcome - you can buy me a coffee below, or get in touch if you want training of for me to help make sense of your data with bespoke dashboards:

https://excelattheoffice.com/buy-coffee

Kind Regards,
Adrian