Excel Accountant: Dashboards In-Depth

Excel expert David Ringstrom, CPA, covers the basics of creating and utilizing Excel dashboards in this comprehensive Excel CPE course. Dashboards empower users to quickly assimilate large amounts of data into spreadsheets by way of pivot tables, charts, and other Excel features. David shows you how to streamline data analysis, expand or collapse rows and/or columns, create dashboards that look less like Excel spreadsheets, filter pivot table data based on date ranges, and more. He takes you beyond basic dashboard techniques in this informative course as well. He digs deeper into the benefits of creating and using dashboards to quickly assimilate large amounts of data. He covers pivot tables, pivot charts, slicers, and other features that allow you to present data in summary form, yet still give you easy access to underlying details. He shows you how to create: dashboards that look less like Excel spreadsheets, dynamic and interactive graphs, self-updating titles for charts and pivot charts, and much more.

David demonstrates every technique at least twice in this continuing education course: first, on a PowerPoint slide with numbered steps, and second, in the subscription-based Office 365 version of Excel. David draws your attention to any differences in the older versions of Excel (2019, 2016, 2013, and earlier) during the presentation as well as in his detailed handouts. David also provides an Excel workbook that includes most of the examples he uses during the CPE webinar.

Office 365 is a subscription-based product that provides new-feature updates as often as monthly. Conversely, the perpetual licensed versions of Excel have feature sets that don’t change. Perpetual licensed versions have year numbers, such as Excel 2019, Excel 2016, and so on.

This Online Excel CPE webinar covers the following Key Topics:

• Creating self-updating titles for charts and pivot charts.
• Exploring the Recommended Charts feature in Excel 2013 and later.
• Discovering how Microsoft Query allows you to create self-updating links to databases, spreadsheets, text files, and other data sources.
• Seeing how the Sparkline feature empowers you to create tiny, in-cell charts for showing trends of data.
• Using the Group and Ungroup features to expand or collapse rows and/or columns.
• Jump-starting data visualization with the Quick Analysis feature.
• Filtering pivot table data based on date ranges by way of the Timeline feature in Excel 2013 and later.
• Learning how to hide or unhide Excel’s Ribbon interface using a simple macro technique.
• Creating dynamic and interactive graphs with Excel’s PivotChart feature.
• Using the Linked Picture feature to place pivot tables near each other without posing conflicts.
• Understanding how to use the Slicer feature to streamline data analysis within tables and pivot tables.
• Creating a dashboard that looks less like an Excel spreadsheet by hiding screen elements.
• Using linked pictures as a navigation tool to return to the source pivot table.
• Exploring how to amend queries exported from Microsoft Query.
• Understanding the conflict that a linked picture overlaying a slicer can pose.
• Creating self-updating chart titles that change automatically as you filter or slice data related to the chart.
• Getting past the “PivotTable field name already exists” prompt once and for all.
• Jump-starting data visualization with the Quick Analysis feature.
• Learning how to hide or reveal Excel’s Ribbon interface using a simple macro technique.
• Streamlining the filtering of lists in Excel 2013 and later by using the Slicer feature with tables.
• Utilizing the Timeline feature in Excel 2013 and later to filter pivot tables based on date ranges.
• Using the Group command to interactively hide/unhide columns (and/or rows) within Excel worksheets.