You’re not just assembling pretty indicator icons, displaying large numbers, and building colorful graphics. Let me repeat that: creating the dashboard is the hard part. If you don’t already have a dashboard, you need to create one. But a dashboard without data is pointless. Data without a dashboard can still be useful. So, dashboards keep people honest and on the right track, and they give people who may only be tangentially connected to the work a sense of the work’s status and progress.īut they’re just a graphical way to represent data.

Nobody wants a bad metric on the company home page or projected during a team meeting. They’re easy to read if designed right, they save time by representing massive amounts of data in one easy-to-understand place, they keep you on task by comparing actuals to projections, and they promote employee performance. Why use a dashboard?ĭashboards are useful ways to communicate complex projects and statuses in a simple and clear way.

Tread carefully and make sure there’s value in moving forward with a dashboard. A pretty dashboard with minimally valuable data and content isn’t worth the time or energy required to create or maintain it. Sure, you can incorporate a lot of this into SharePoint, and my favorite method is using Excel and displaying the dashboard directly on a SharePoint page.Įmbedding an Excel spreadsheet is far from the only way to do a dashboard in SharePoint, but it’s definitely one of the easiest to implement quickly since most people have a basic understand of how Excel works.īut for every dashboard request I get, I send a word of caution: dashboards are only as good as the data they represent.

Squareup dashboard