Balanced Scorecards and Operational Dashboards with Microsoft Excel 2nd Edition

After looking over some reviews and quickly glancing through a copy at a bookstore, I bought this book specifically to learn about PowerPivot and other Excel techniques that I could use to create efficient and effective management reporting (dashboards or otherwise). Considering myself an experience, intermediate level Excel user, I found the book more useful than I expected. Before getting into specifics about Excel for dashboards, the author, Ron Person, spends a great deal of time providing background on what makes a good scorecard, etc. -- a dashboard primer. He offers practical advice on the up-front work needed to create a good dashboard and potential pitfalls of not doing your homework.When it comes to Excel techniques, he takes great pains to illustrate simple constructs that can be carried out in several generations of Excel and / or points out what would need to be done to accomplish the same or similar. I was surprised at how many "general" Excel techniques I picked-up, including learning about functions I never thought I would use, like REPT (repetition of text) that I assumed was some esoteric text function. Being exposed to the CAMERA functionality (a tool I had never heard of before) was a revelation -- I don't know why this feature of Excel hasn't been more heavily promoted.Finally, he not only includes links to examples and test data that you can use to practice the techniques he covers, but he provides a generous compliment of links and references to other websites that either provide further information or complimentary material on such things as color palettes (choosing the right colors for dashboard elements).I know I will be referring back to this book often for additional tips and tricks to improve my capabilities with Excel.

This book predominantly focuses on MS office (2003 to 2010) so it does cover the full range and the author understands the pains of backward compatibility. If you are an openoffice use or IBM Symphony user, this book is not for you.What I loved most is the description of the addons in excel I never knew existed. ASAP and Powerpivot being two of them.The author also details some of the hidden functionality of excel, however if you are an excel power user, it may not be of interest to you.Overall good, but a bit pricey for close to 30 bucks

I do a great deal of Dashboard work n Excel and I highly recommend this book. The first several chapters cover the concepts of implementing Balanced Scorecards in a business which is great if that is your task. I'd not seen that subject treated else where to the same extent so this is a bonus to me. Moving on through the book there are numerous very useful and practical techniques to accomplish things in Excel 90% of the world is completely unaware of. If you realy want to improve your skills and WOW people, this book is a great knowledge enhancer for you. That and becoming familiar with several of the key websites for Excel Guru's will move you quickly toward being recognized for your skills in this arena. I purchased several copies of this book as gifts for some budding Excel guru's. I think you will be very pleased if your goal is to deepen your skills and presentation of data. Buy this book!

I expected that this book was a good guide how to make beautiful dashboards. The technical advise is good but maybe it it out of date.

The book is a great tool to find new perspectives in the generation of new format and displays for KPI's tables and sheet. It could be useful for intermediate and advanced Excel user. Specially, if you have read the Stephen Few's books, this is the appropiate book to read in order to apply the learning in Excel.

This an exceptional book for just about any level of Scorecard user, I found it to be both informative and a valuable reference resource. This alone would have gotten it five stars....BUT I personally felt the sections on operational dashboards detracted from a great book.If you need to know about dashboards Steven Few has some exceptional works out there.Again my personal feelings are that Ron Person's efforts would have been better spent focusing entirely on Balanced Scorecards.

Reading the information on why was more important for me than how.

Great book and well presented