Basic Dashboarding Using Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts

In the previous step, you experimented with pivot tables by summarising data from your Excel table, and you’ve learned that pivot tables are great for summarising large quantities of data.

In this step, we’ll introduce you to dashboards. We’ll also experiment with creating pivot charts.

Dashboards

We’ve explored various ways in which data can be presented in Excel. Another useful tool for displaying data in dashboards.

Dashboard reports provide you with a broad overview of your data and allow you to make informed decisions based on this overview of your dataset.

Pivot Chart

A pivot chart is the visual representation of a pivot table in Excel and is connected to the pivot table.

You can display multiple charts using many different chart types when creating pivot charts.

Before you proceed to the following step, take a moment to reflect and recap.

In case you missed it, check out the overview of Excel tables. Also, take a few minutes to browse through these resources:

• Overview of pivot tables and pivot charts
• Creating a pivot chart
• Sort data in a pivot table

In the next section, we’ll continue our exploration of dashboards. We will learn how to manage the sort function in pivot charts to maintain the logical order of data and we’ll add slicers to our pivot charts.

Join The Discussion

When we think back to the beginning of this course, we note that standard charts and pivot charts are not that different from each other. Can you think of a scenario where you’d use standard charts instead of pivot charts or vice versa?