BI dashboards and Excelential
BI dashboards and Excelential are complementary technology and products.
They address different problems and needs. You should use the appropriate tool to solve your problem.
Excelential places available information from your spreadsheets on a dashboard
If you already have the charts, totals, and tables that you need in existing Excel spreadsheets, Excelential is the dashboard solution you need. Setting up an Excelential dashboard is quicker and easier than any other technology, because you only have to copy from Excel and paste to the dashboard.
It will find and fetch updates to your Excel files. Then, it updates the dashboard automatically.
You may learn more about Excelential's features and benefits in the other articles on this website.
Excel dashboard reports are visual representations of familiar data
If your current Excel spreadsheets do not contain the kinds of charts and tables you want on a dashboard, you will need to use techniques associated with "Excel dashboard reports". These advanced Excel techniques let you create informative visual representations of data in Excel spreadsheets. Here is a starter list of top Excel MVPs offering information and templates that show you how to create advanced data visualization charts and dashboards from Excel spreadsheets:
Excel dashboard reports are useful when you have spreadsheet data that is not available from a data warehouse, datamart, or other such database. If you have business analysts or staff who are very comfortable with Excel, this approach can provide a quick, flexible, and low-cost solution.
If you need more than one "Excel dashboard report" (say, because you have spreadsheets coming from different departments), you should consider having an Excelential dashboard that combines information from them. Excelential makes it possible to use Excel dashboard reporting techniques to create the individual dashboard objects in Excel spreadsheets. Then, Excelential dashboards can combine the information from the different spreadsheets into a single screen.
BI dashboards transform raw data into visual indicators
If your spreadsheets only contain raw data that is also available in a database, data warehouse or datamart, consider using a BI dashboard. BI dashboards use analytic methods and data visualization technology to help users uncover data relationships and other information you would miss if you were looking at raw data. This is very valuable when you have large quantities of raw data (e.g., from a data warehouse).
However, BI dashboards require a huge amount of expertise, effort and resources to implement properly. They also require you to change the way you work, because the objects on the dashboard are new to you.
And the dashboards aren't Excel spreadsheets, so you have to learn how to operate them. If your spreadsheets already contain the data you need, using a BI dashboard may be an expensive overkill.
Newspapers as an analogy
Let’s use newspapers as an analogy to Excel spreadsheets.
Using Excelential would be like creating an index from the headlines of the articles in the newspaper. The content doesn't change. But with the index, you are informed about the important news at a glance. You can then select which articles you want to read in full.
Excel dashboard reports would be like a collection of techniques for creating good article headlines.
In contrast, using BI dashboards would be like using the newspaper articles as research material only. You then create a Powerpoint presentation from the material in the articles, using a complex analytical process. The result is an entirely different document in an entirely different medium.
