How to Set-up your own Dashboard
The process for setting up your own dashboard is fairly straight forward (once you have done it once or twice) for all templates. Simply complete all of the fields within the Setup Dashboard worksheet and click the Set-up Dashboard button. Each field has a description attached to the cell as a comment providing details on what is required. Then delete the worksheets for unused Dashboard versions, Setup Dashboard & Instructions. The dashboard can be saved in any format.
A couple of points that appear to trip people up:
- The colour scheme actually requires you to change the cell colour to the desired dashboard colour
- The dashboard set-up process can only be run once – if you didn’t get it all right the first time, start again with a fresh copy of the template
- You do need macros enabled in order to create the dashboard (and update it & use the drop-down menus)
How to Update your Dashboard
The dashboard templates are designed to be updated automatically via the Data Summary worksheet. The worksheet needs to be populated somehow, whether via an API, copy & pasting the data or simply entering the data in manually. There is a date field on the Data Summary worksheet that needs to be updated (the dashboard update won’t work if this is not correct). Then the Update Dashboard button can be pressed to transfer the data into the relevant worksheets and update the dashboard.
If you are transferring data into the Dashboard file either using an API or manually copying data, I recommend transferring this data into a new worksheet. The cells in the Data Summary worksheet can be linked to this new worksheet using simple Excel functions to transform this data into the required structure.
