Easy Dashboarding

You can add visual pizazz to any report with a simple bit of logic and the Wingdings 3 font.

In this example, an expense statement compares one family's household spending to the standard working family.  There are several items which could be lower, higher, or the same as the standard ratio.

Showing the numbers side-by-side is an effective way to highlight this information.  Adding a graphic goes even further, literally illustrating the data.  But linking an image to data in a cell is pretty tricky, which is why Excel makes charts so nicely.  Charts can be overkill sometimes, while I try to keep things as simple as possible whenever possible.  To which, this is precisely why Microsoft added the Wingdings fonts to Windows.  This formula...

         

=IF(c2>d2,"r",IF(c2<d2,"s","D"))

...evaluates to either an r, s or D, depending on a value being higher, lower or equivalent to another value.  These characters, rendered in the Wingdings 3 font, give an "up", "down" or "equality" pictogram which shows up nicely in the spreadsheet, in line with the data it illustrates.  Here's how it looks (click to enlarge):

Depending on your data set, you can go further: applying conditional formatting to add colour based on some condition, or displaying a temperature gauge for "corporate heat" levels.

There are many hundreds of interesting symbols built-in to the standard font libraries on your computer.  Explore the choices visually by menuing to Insert...Symbol and paging through the lists in the dialog.  Just pick the symbols you think will best exemplify the "at-a-glance" impact of your findings, figure out what their letter-equivalent characters are, and sub those into your nested-if formula.  Your reports will pop, your workbooks will stay light and lean, and accolades are sure to follow.