Learniing to build dashboards in Excel and Access

N2IT

Anyone have any experience building out dashboards? I have found a few websites that claim to teach you for several hundreds of dollars.

Is this one of those things where I should just banging out VBA in Excel and experiment with Youtube tutorials etc

or

Actually going through one of those training programs. I can already do advanced functions in Excel and Access so I am not sure if it's worth it.

paul78

If you find anything, would you mind sharing. I'm a bit curious myself.

But to be honest, I've always been a proponent of doing dashboards for reports in Powerpoint instead. It's easier to pull in slides from many areas and roll-them up as a package for reporting purposes.

N2IT

I'm importing them into sharepoint now. I used to build them in PowerPoint. My goal is to build interactive reporting dashboards.

Ill keep you posted

paul78

Ah - I see what you mean.

Just a thought....

If you are looking for interactive dashboards, you may want to think about doing a simple web app with SSRS. It could be a way to build consolidated dashboards and reporting across the org. See Create a Reporting Services report by using Dashboard Designer

I also played around recently with Pentaho which looks pretty cool - Community Wiki Home - Pentaho Community - Pentaho Wiki

RobertKaucher

I've developed a library to simplify the use of the Client Object Model in SharePoint 2010. I use this in conjunction with Kendo Data Viz and I build some pretty decent charts and graphs. This also allows me to easily integrate with non-SharePoint data that has some sort of JSON endpoint.

HTML5 data visualizations for sleek business apps | Kendo UI DataViz

Also, there isn't any reason a sophisticated admin who has some Visual Studio skills could not package these into reusable web parts with just a little bit of research.

N2IT

Thanks for the follow up gents.

I'll keep all posted as I move forward.

Xcluziv

You can build some pretty slick interactive dashboards with the new BI Stack used within SharePoint with the new features for SQL Server 2012. Using Excel Services, SSAS, SSRS, PowerPivot, PowerView and Performance Point you can build some intuitive dashboards. Using Microsoft Excel 2010 and downloading the PowerPivot plug-in for Excel you can create some quick Excel dashboards in no time via creating PowerPivot workbook.

PowerPivot for Excel

Use PowerPivot Workbooks on SharePoint

RobertKaucher

Us poor users of Standard don't get all that fancy stuff, though...

Xcluziv

Rob, I've on downloadelyd the new features for SQL Server 2012 on our Dev server (using the development version). The Standard copy does not have the BI Stack....only the Development and Enterprise versions....now ask me how I know -_- . Tried installing those features multiple times until one of the Data Services guys looked it up and told me....