Last week I wrote about some basics of webanalytics dashboards and explained how to make nice visualizations with excel charts. In fact, I would like to stay at excel this week as I’m getting more and more convinced of the enormous database potential the program offers. Some excel-advantages I discovered during my dashboard journey:

• It corresponds perfectly with data from major webanalytics tools (like Google Analytics or WebTrends)
• Information can be easily published in PDF
• Ease month-to-month (or year-to-year) analysis: define statistics, set targets, make a format and every month can be directly analysed
• Avoid people accessing the original web analytics tool (because these reports are often not usable for presenting the essential information compared to the dashboard)
• Include comments for evaluating reasons
• Choose from an enormous pool of free excel plugins different tools for fancy charts, specialized templates, tutorial software and other add-ons.

Ofcourse there are many more reasons for using excel – as also mentioned last week. But these above I really appreciate when executing such activities for a management board. If there are still some excel critics while reading this article, make a quick sidestep to discover if you’re making these mistakes ;)

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Alright, now you’re totally convinced of using excel for business purposes. Let’s head on to this week’s subjects: what’s the essential information – or key performance indicators (KPI’s) – you want to report in the dashboard Read more »