Excel® 2007 Dashboards & Reports For Dummies®

Chapter 8. Components That Group and Bucket Data

It's often helpful to organize your analyses into logical groups of data. Grouping allows you to focus on manageable sets that have key attributes. For example, instead of looking at all customers in one giant view, you can analyze customers who buy only one product. This allows you to focus attention and resources on those customers who have the potential of buying more products.

The benefit of grouping data is that it allows you to more easily pick out groups that fall outside the norm for your business.

In this chapter, I explore some of the techniques you can use to create components that group and bucket data.

Creating Top and Bottom Displays

When I look at the list of Fortune 500 companies, I immediately look to see the top 20 companies. Then I look to see who just eked in at the bottom 20. I rarely check to see who's number 251. It's not because I don't care about number 251; it's just that I don't have the time or energy to process all 500 companies. So I process the top and bottom of the list.

This is the same concept behind creating top and bottom displays. Your audience has only a certain amount of time and resources to dedicate to solving any issues you can highlight in your reporting mechanism. Showing them the top and bottom values in a dataset can help them pinpoint where and how they can have the most impact with the time and resources they do have.

Incorporating top and bottom displays into dashboards

The top and bottom ...