Now that we have our data elements for a dashboard, we'll start to pull the pieces together and format them. The stereotype is that accountants care more about the numbers than about presentation. The stereotype misses the point, as do some accountants. The point is to present the numbers in a way that they can be clearly understood. Burying important data in a long, ugly list of numbers is an accounting sin. So is hiding poor financial results by surrounding them with upbeat photos in an annual report. Both methods are attempts to hide the truth. With our dashboard, we are trying to present information in a way that makes it easy to understand and discover new insights. In this chapter we will start assembling and formatting our dashboard using:
Get Pivot Data
Excel formatting
Icon sets
Data bars
Color Scales
Other formatting
The idea behind conditional formatting is that we want data elements to change visually based on...