Foreign Assistance Dashboard

Dashboard Spy here with a look at the White House’s most recent enterprise dashboard designed to promote more transparency on how the government allocates its funds.

The U.S. government’s Foreign Assistance Dashboard is maintained by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Take a look at this Federal business intelligence dashboard at this link: http://www.foreignassistance.gov. Click on this image to enlarge the dashboard screenshot:

The U.S. Federal Foreign Assistance Dashboard

The administration hopes that the site will help governments receiving funds to better plan and budget, as well enable donors to coordinate and target investments more effectively, according to the post. As with other federal dashboards, the government also hopes the public will hold agencies accountable for the money being spent to ensure it is not used wastefully.

My impression on the dashboard design:

Love the left/right navigation arrows on either side of the main graphic. Combined with the partial view of the dashboard metric “previous” (to the left) and the “next” chart (to the right), these arrows complement the sliding graphics device perfectly.

Tags: U.S. Foreign Aid Dashboard, Foreign Assistance Dashboard

Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

Data Visualization References

Dashboard designers interested in data visualization must browse the amazing list of data visualization references at the Chris Maven blog.

30 minutes spent browsing through the incredibly imaginative world of data depiction gives you a huge degree of respect for the visual arts and the way data can come alive before our eyes.

Here are some favorite blogs on data visualization:

Blog about Stats

Climate
Charts & Graphs

informationisbeautiful.net

Visualizing
Economics – Gallery

Financial
Infographics – Making Sense of This Financial Mess!

Diagrams:
everything is connected to everything else

Some of this work is simply stunning. In fact, you’ll see clearly that information visualizations are simply too “big” to put on a dashboard. Dashboards have charts and graphs. These infoviz artifacts go way beyond that. They are “dashboards” unto themselves.

Hubert Lee

The Dashboard Spy

Excel Dashboard Tutorial

Microsoft Excel (particularly Excel 2010 with it’s data visualization functionality) continues to be a strong choice for business intelligence dashboards – particularly for those without access to a team of developers and database programmers.

in this hour long Excel Dashboard Tutorial, you can watch a real-life excel dashboard being designed and constructed.

Here’s what the excel dashboard looks like:

Anyone who uses excel and would like to see what kind of dashboard can be created in excel should watch this video lesson. Taught by veteran dashboard expert and excel guru, Chandoo, this tutorial is 65 minutes long and includes:

• Dashboard Design Principles
• Dashboard Architecture Considerations
• Data Cleansing
• Pivot Table Techniques
• Excel Word Clouds

This Excel Dashboard Tutorial is highly recommended to Dashboard Spy readers.

Enterprise Dashboard Examples

Enterprise dashboard examples can be found at the following blogs:

Dashboards.org
Dashboards.tv
Dashboard Spy
Dashboards by Example

Excel dashboard examples are among the featured posts at enterprisedashboards.com

Excel Dashboards for Information Visualization

Really excellent examples of Excel Dashboards continue to come from Chandoo, author of Excel Forumla Helper.

Take a look at this infographic-style Excel dashboard. It’s made with Excel 2010 (now with sparklines!).

You can download this excel dashboard from Chandoo’s post: An Excel Info-graphic Poster.

Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

Excel Tutorials Now Available at Microsoft Excel School

Excel tutorial tip of the day: Think Excel when you think Dashboards.

Excel dashboards are proving to be the most cost effective business intelligence dashboard tools. First of all, everyone has Microsoft Excel, it’s already the standard for data analysis, and the new charting features are quite powerful.

We are seeing more and more data visualization being done in Excel. Everyone is urged to sharpen their Microsoft Excel skills especially in the area of charting.

The Excel tutorials at Chandoo.org have always been my favorite and are well worth checking out. See http://budurl.com/exceltutorial

Pointy Haired Dilbert (PHD – the editor of Chandoo.org and author of Excel Forumla Helper) is now offering EXCEL SCHOOL.

The content is awesome and some really excellent excel tutorials are going to be offered.

Check out the content:

Tags: Excel tutorials

Dashboards Blogging Community Launches

The Dashboard Spy is proud to announce the opening of the Dashboards .ORG business intelligence community.

Dashboard design, enterprise dashboards, scorecards, kpi metrics, enterprise reporting – these are just some of the topics to be found at http://dashboards.org

Regards Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

Project Management KPI Dashboard

Contract Project KPIs tracked on Project Management Dashboard

This project management dashboard shows the billable and non-billable costs on contract projects.

The key performance measures (KPI) include

• Cost
• Percent of budget
• Billable cost
• Percent of cost
• Non-billable cost