: Built an interactive Excel dashboard for retail sales analysis — 4 KPI cards, region/category breakdowns, monthly trends, and a salesperson leaderboard, all powered by live formulas (SUMIFS, SUMPRODUCT, COUNTIF) with no hardcoded numbers.
BEFORE: Client had messy Excel inventory with 500 rows, duplicates (A12 / a12), blanks, wrong prices like "$ 2.5" and "N/A", and different warehouse names (KER / ker / Kericho).
AFTER: I did:
Removed 12 duplicate SKUs
Standardized item names to Title Case
Fixed QTY and Prices to 2 decimals
Unified Warehouse to Kericho
Made sheet ready for pivot dashboard
Result: Clean, ready-to-use inventory in 2 days using Excel.
Tools: Excel, Remove Duplicates, Text to Columns, TRIM, PROPER
3 mistakes that will eventually make this board useless. 📉
I've reviewed several client dashboards over the years, and the same 3 problems show up over and over:
1️⃣ Too many charts, no clear takeaway — if I can't tell what to do after looking at it, it's decoration, not a dashboard.
2️⃣ Colors with no consistent meaning — red means "unacceptable" on one chart and "category 3" on the next. Pick a system and stick with it.
3️⃣ No comparison point — a number alone means nothing. "Revenue: $12,480" tells you nothing. "Revenue: $12,480 (+18% vs last month)" tells you everything.
Fix these three, and your data stops being numbers on a page — it starts being something people actually use to decide.
What's the most common dashboard mistake you've seen? 👇