This chapter is like a goody bag. There are a number of things in here that can really make a dashboard sing. Each dashboard is unique. Companies have many of the same information needs, but often they need to be presented in different ways. Tools like the ones in this chapter give you options to customize a dashboard for your organization.
We've built a dashboard for Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 from scratch using Microsoft Excel 2013. Along the way, we've explored a number of different ways to put the pieces together so that you can build one for your organization. A basic, Excel-based dashboard simply uses all of the tools common to Excel pros: pivot tables, charts, slicers, and formatting to present data in a way that's easy to understand. Connecting Excel data to the source data in Dynamics GP 2013 makes that data easy to refresh as well. Now it's your turn. Go experiment. Build something. Fail. Build something else. Succeed a little. Finally, build something great.