I offer my Dashboard Design training as a standalone workshop, as a module to accompany my Data Visualization workshop, or as a webinar.
First, we review the best-bang-for-your-buck data visualization design principles, like reducing clutter and emphasizing your key point with titles, subtitles, annotations, and saturation.
Second, once you’ve designed one great graph, it’s time to combine multiple graphs together for your report, slideshow, or handout. The key page layout techniques include designing within a grid system; sketching layouts on paper; ensuring that there is adequate white space between chunks of content; and establishing a visual hierarchy within individual graphs and for the publication as a whole. You’ll view my real-life examples so that you can see how grids, white space, and visual hierarchies are applied in each setting.
Third, you learn the major dashboard types:
I share my nine sample dashboards with you and you’ll vote on which two or three styles you’d like to create from scratch in Excel.
We design static dashboards within Excel. These dashboards will live inside of Excel and get shared with stakeholders as PDFs through email or as printed handouts during meetings. I no longer teach anyone how to create interactive dashboards in Excel because they simply don’t get used as often as static dashboards. Life’s short and I’m only going to teach you about visualizations that make a difference.
