Spruce Up Your Dashboard Using Charts and Drill-Down Menus - Part 1

In the next 3 posts I will show you a neat way to display your data with charts. By using drill-down menus we can show multiple data sets - all related in some way - in the same chart, with one data set showing at a time. Download the example file here and try it out yourself.

What you can see in "Dashboard" tab is one chart, with a drill-down button as shown below.

Clink on the button, and a drill-down menu will appear.

This drill-down menu provides the user with multiple options, from showing the sales data on the national level to showing same data on the district level. The chart will redraw automatically each time a different option item is clicked. Furthermore, headers in Range C1 as well as the textbox right above the chart will also change accordingly.

I see at least two big advantages to utilize such a drill-down menu:

1), The data is being presented in a way that is highly organized. By designing your own drill-down menus you can group related data sets together, making your data logically structured and easy to follow.

2), By using one chart area for multiple data sets you also save space, and your report will look so much more clean and usable.

I will only show you the key sections of Macro in my posts and you can always refer to the Macro in its entirety in the example file you just downloaded.