MIS Cockpit Enterprise Dashboard – Putting Excel on steroids with Palo, an open source business intelligence tool

Thanks to a tip from a Dashboard Spy reader, I’ve been checking out the Palo open source tool at http://www.palo.net. The product is an open source business intelligence tool that works in conjunction with Microsoft Excel. It is basically a data store for Excel that permits incredibly huge amounts of data in a small number of worksheets.

Here are a couple of dashboard screenshots. The first shows the MIS Cockpit which is a demo application you can download and try. According to the site: “The application only consists of five Palo enabled screens. But these screens hold as much data as thousands of conventional Excel worksheets.”

This next screenshot shows a sales analysis dashboard using the palo product:

Homework: Getting into enterprise dashboarding with Excel? Review charting with this book: Excel Charts for Dummies. If you are on an enterprise dashboard project, do yourself a favor and take a look at Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing enterprise dashboards.

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books on business dashboards.