Sure, you can add anything and everything to your dashboard. (Here’s a running list of all the great graphs you can make in Excel.)

In this article, you’ll learn about 20 stress-free charts that we can make inside spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel.

These visuals can be added to static or interactive dashboards.

They’re fast for us to make… which means a quick turnaround time for your audiences. No need to wait weeks or months until a dashboard is ready! These visuals are made within minutes, so your dashboard is ready same-day.

This is a preview of everything that’s included inside Dashboard Design. This hybrid course includes 9 modules of self-paced lessons along with live Office Hours.

Module 1 is all about planning, deciding what to include, and iterating.

Module 2 involves hands-on practice to create these 20 stress-free charts.

Visualizing 1 Point in Time

In the first lesson of Dashboard Design, you’ll make stress-free charts for visualizing 1 point in time inside spreadsheet software like Excel.

You’ll create:

• (1) Tallies
• (2) Circles
• (3) Filled Squares
• (4) Outlined Squares
• (5) Bars
• (6) Stacked Bars
• (7) Heat Tables

In the Dashboard Design course, you’ll download the file, practice along with me, and pause and re-watch segments as needed. 

You’ll see my Answer Key with the formulas on the left, and you’ll practice in the Your Turn section on the right.

You’ll learn which techniques are best for small n’s vs. big n’s.

​You’ll see case studies of these techniques being used in real dashboards, slides, reports and even as appendices to technical reports.

You’ll hear me talking about “Big A” Accessibility (508/ADA guidelines) as we go, ensuring that your stress-free charts match your existing branding while also being colorblind-friendly and grayscale-printing friendly.

This is a 26-minute lesson; there are timestamps below the video so you can easily rewind or fast-forward. The timestamps making re-watching segments easier for Future You. 

Every video has captions that can be turned on/off. Every video has a full transcript​, too (so you can skim the transcript and see which lessons will be most helpful to you). Dashboard Design includes ~20 case studies in Modules 8 and 9, and nobody needs to watch them all. You can skip around and see which case studies from fellow participants are most applicable to your own industry and workplace.​

Visualizing Exactly 2 Points in Time

In the next lesson of Dashboard Design, you’ll create stress-free charts for visualizing exactly 2 points in time.

These are the charts you’ll need for before/after, pre/post, baseline/endline, etc. dashboards.

You’ll create:

• (8) Slope charts
• (9) Column charts
• (10) Win/loss columns
• (11) Deviation bars
• (12) Checkboxes
• (13) Sort-of checkboxes with squares
• (14) Sort-of checkboxes with circles

3+ Points in Time

Do you collect and share data every week, month, quarter, or year?

These are the stress-free charts that can showcase your time series patterns.

​Inside Dashboard Design, you’ll create:

• (15) Trendlines
• (16) Column charts
• (17) Win/loss columns

Progress Towards a Goal

​Then, you’ll create:

• (18) Checkboxes
• (19) Deviation bars
• (20) Spillover bars

Putting It All Together

​In the final lesson of this module of Dashboard Design, you’ll practice applying all the skills you just learned.

You’ll take this boring, black and white table…

and transform it into a professional, skimmable dashboard. 

This is the first of many before/after transformations you’ll make alongside me.

Later in the Dashboard Design course, in Module 3, you’ll practice making more of these static dashboards from start to finish. Static dashboards are great for busy, technical audiences who just need a 1-pager of key findings. 

In Modules 4, 5, 6, and 7, you’ll make interactive dashboards in Excel.​

Your Turn

Comment here: Which of these stress-free charts are you already familiar with? Which ones are new?

If you’ve got a column chart with lots of labels, chances are, the labels have gotten twisted diagonally, like this:

Diagonal text takes longer to read than plain ol’ horizontal text, so we want to avoid it.

In this lesson, you’ll learn 5 ways to fix those lonnng chart labels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixLC9irm6pA

What’s Inside

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:58 Fix 1: Slow-to-Read Diagonal Text
• 1:18 Fix 2: Unreadable Tiny Text
• 1:38 Fix 3: Cartoonishly-Big Chart
• 2:38 Fix 4: Column Chart into Bar Chart (with Change Chart Type)
• 3:27 Fix 5: Forced Line Breaks in Chart Labels
• 3:56 What NOT To Do: Clicking the Space Bar a Bajillion Times
• 4:10 What TO Do: Alt + Enter
• 4:38 Mixing and Maxing these 5 Fixes for Your Dataset
• 4:58 Your Turn

Resources Mentioned

• Download the Excel file shown in the lesson
• Related tutorial: Adjusting the Outside and Inside Chart Borders in Excel

Transcript

Ann K. Emery: [00:00:00] If your chart has really long labels, chances are, Excel did this.

It probably tilted the labels diagonally, which takes longer to read, obviously, or it might’ve done the thing where it gives you some of the words and then dot, dot, dot, and it cuts them off. And. We can’t keep that.

So in this video, I’m going to show you five fixes.

And your data set is going to be totally different from my super fake one that I have here.

So you’re going to have to try these different fixes and then please, please, please comment below the video and let me know which fix works for you. Um, I’m Ann Emery. You’re watching Dataviz on the Go, the series where you learn dataviz time savers inside everyday software like Excel and PowerPoint and Word. And speaking of dataviz being on the go, I am leading office hours for my online course students in three minutes.

So let’s go, let’s go through these fixes really quickly. All right.

Fix number one [00:01:00] is you could just leave it alone and say, I don’t care if diagonal text takes longer to read, screw the people looking at this graph. They’re just going to have to take longer to read it. I know you’re not thinking that. I just wanted to show you like what, what not to do.

Okay. So we’re not just going to leave it like that.

Fix number two, uh, you could just say. I don’t care if people wear contacts or glasses. I’m just going to shrink down the font size until everything is horizontal. But, uh, I know, I know you’re not that rude. Okay. You’re not doing unreadable font either.

So that brings us to fix three, which actually might work. Fix three is you take your chart and you make it bigger until the labels are horizontal and it might have to be really big. It might have to be like, how big does it like this big? And then you have to adjust the inside border so you don’t have this weird white space.

I’ve got [00:02:00] other videos about this that I’ll link to up above too. If you’re like inside border, outside border, what’s that? You can go watch that quick tutorial as well. Now, enlarging the chart to get horizontal, easy to read labels, it might just work. Like if, if this chart is going into a wide PowerPoint slide, you can have a wide chart.

But what if your chart has to fit in this little teeny tiny spot on your dashboard screen? Then, uh, Your chart can’t be this wide, right? So this one gets like a, what are we kind of scoring the solution? Like a, a maybe, like a meh kind of squiggle. All right, fix four. You could change your columns into bars.

People think, Oh, now I’m going to have to delete my chart and start over. False. You don’t have to do that. You’re just going to take your chart and click on it. You’re going to do a right click and you go to change chart type. Bars and columns are similar, but Excel does not [00:03:00] consider them to be identical charts.

So you go to change chart type, it opens up the menu and you’re going to pick the bar chart. Okay. And then you still, of course, have to resize it a little bit. You’re left with this weird white space, but then your labels have all the breathing room that they need on the side. I often pick this solution.

I often change columns into bars. I have to do this for many, many projects. So that one’s going to get like a hooray. Check that it works. And then fix number five, I had to do this recently on a chart that looked similar to this. These aren’t the real countries or the real like scores or whatever this pretend data set would be about.

But the chart did look more or less like this. And I had to do fix five, which is forced. I’m going to show you what not to do, and then what to do. A forced line break would be, you take something that has two words, like South Korea. Here’s what not to do. You do space, space, space. And if you do enough [00:04:00] spaces, it forces a line break.

And that works, but there’s a little bit of a fancier behind the scenes workaround. So a forced line break, I would suggest would be Alt Enter. You’re going to have to look at your keyboard to do this. You’re going to click in between the two words where you want the line break and you’re going to do Alt Enter.

Hold down alt and then do enter, and it makes a new line. You can see it in that cell. You can see it up here in the formula bar, and then you can see it in the chart. In real life, you might actually have to mix and match some of these fixes. You might have to do a forced line break. You might have to enlarge the font size or shrink it just ever so slightly.

You might have to make the chart wider. Or not. Okay. So hopefully these five fixes have given you like some ideas, right? For your own troubleshooting. Okay. It is time for office [00:05:00] hours. I’ve got to go. I am a little bit late. Unfortunately, it’s your turn. Give this a try and comment below the video and let me know, did this work?

Did this not, did you run into some other challenge that you need help with? Let me know. And I’ll probably make a video just for you. Thank you.