In our example dashboard, we're limited in the graphics that are available to us. I wanted to use pictures that are available to the widest number of users. But, I also don't want you to be limited to what everyone else does. If you use Google or Bing to look up images of Excel-based dashboards, they all quickly start to look alike. We're going to look at a different example to help provide some inspiration.
Author Tyler Chessman has written a book on the U.S. national debt. The book is appropriately titled Understanding the United States Debt. What's really cool for us is that Tyler has taken the U.S. national debt and broken it down in Excel using all the elements that we've used for our dashboard. It is, without a doubt, the best looking Excel dashboard that I've ever seen.
The debt data is loaded via PowerPivot, which we look at in the next chapter, and the Excel sheet is available for download at http://understandingtheusdebt.com/data.aspx.
This fantastic dashboard looks like...