Author: Ben

Excel tutorial: Building a dynamic, animated dashboard for U.S. political data

Excel dynamic dashboard screenshot

Who doesn’t love a dynamic, animated Excel dashboard?

Here’s one I’ve been working on recently, a data visualization of historical U.S. political data, showing party trends, state populations and sitting presidents over time:

Excel Dynamic Dashboard - US Political data

In the following post, I delve into the details of how I created this dashboard. It’s not a full cell-by-cell account of how I did it, because that would require an article at least twice as long, but rather a look at the various steps and thought processes along the way.

If it appears a little ragged, that’s because it probably is! Most likely because I’m writing this bleary eyed at 1am, between feeds and diaper changes of my 6 week old son. 😉

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Using Google Sheets as a basic web scraper

Want to build a web scraper in Google Sheets? Turns out, basic web scraping, automatically grabbing data from websites, is possible right in your Google Sheet, without needing to write any code.

You can extract specific information from a website and show it in your Google Sheet using some of Sheets’ special formulas.

For example, recently I needed to find out the authors for a long list of blog posts from a Google Analytics report, to identify the star authors pulling in the page views. It would have been extremely tedious to open each link and manually enter each author’s name. Thankfully, there are some techniques available in Google Sheets to do this for us. Continue reading Using Google Sheets as a basic web scraper

10 Techniques for building a Google Sheets Dashboard

You’re probably familiar with using Google Sheets to organize and analyze your data. But did you know you can build a dynamic Google Sheets dashboard to really understand your data?

With a handful of powerful techniques, you can add some pizzazz and dynamism to the presentation of your data. Here are ten tricks to try next time you’re building a Google Sheets dashboard.

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Building a dynamic dashboard for a 3-day digital flash sale

This time last year I worked with The Write Life during their three-day sale of The Writer’s Bundle, a collection of digital products for writers. I built a dynamic dashboard using Google spreadsheets so the team could visually monitor progress throughout the sale.

This year The Writer’s Bundle 2015 was bigger and better than ever, so I wanted to create an even more useful dashboard for the team. The dashboard was a key tool for the team, to monitor both overall and individual sales channel performance, as well as to be a motivating force by giving everyone a visual sense of progress.

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Creating a custom Google Analytics report in a Google spreadsheet

Continuing my recent infatuation with dashboards in Google spreadsheets, I’ve been playing around with the Google Analytics Add-on to build a custom web analytics dashboard in a Google spreadsheet.

The idea originated from discussions with my wife about the tedium of preparing month-end website performance reports for her content management clients. This dashboard was a solution to streamline the monthly web reporting and offer insights that might otherwise be missed. Rather than having to visit Google Analytics for each website in turn and click around gathering the necessary data, this pulls it all together in one place.

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