We will also create few bar trending charts.

Consider the below sample data

Source File: You can download the excel file here

The above excel file tracks few metrics such as safety, quality and revenue. This is just a sample data and may not make sense in actual world but just imagine a manufacturing company that wants to track its overall safety and quality score and also track its total revenue. Now the company may use its own method at deriving the individual safety and quality scores.

They may have a dedicated team to collect safety violations and product defects and then use some formulae to convert those data into final score for any given month. We are not concerned with any of the methods on how those scores are generated. You are the dashboard person and the company has provided you the metrics by each month and now your job is produce a nice dashboard that shows relevant charts for the given data.

Since the data is tracked for each month, it makes sense to show a line or bar chart trending for the metrics.

Dials and Speedometers are relevant when we need to show performance of a single value. So in this case, since we have 12 month data, how do we show single value on the meter chart?

One solution is to show an ‘Average’ value for the safety and Quality metrics or we could show a dial that shows the current month values.

So the GOAL for this exercise is: Show bar chart for Safety trending 12 months and show average and current month value on the dial chart.

Dial chart requirement: For the dial chart, we are measuring the performance, whether we are on track or missed the goal. In order to achieve that, we create three new columns for safety such as ’safety_bad’, ’safety_ok’, safety_good’. These values need to be decided by the company management. If you are not sure, then look at previous year data and decide what should be good and bad values. The dials are used to guide the company to perform better or atleast improve that portion of the company operation represented by the metric.

First let us create the date hierarchy columns from the Period column. You need to make sure that the Period column is an actual Excel date column, else the hierarchy will not be generated

Right click on the period column, select Create -> Add Year, Quarter, Month columns

As you see we added the year and month columns. We may not use all of the above columns but having them ready gives us the option during the chart building.

Now right click on the “Name” and select ‘Create Chart”

We selected the ‘Bar’ chart type

For the x-axis we select the month column and for the y – axis we select the Safety metric

Next, we click on the “Create Chart” button

This action takes us to the below dialog

We rename the chart to ‘Safety’ and then click on ‘Fully Apply’

This action create the below chart (You may need to move the screens and dialog around to see the chart behind)

Now having the chart wizard open, we change the selection to ‘Dial’ chart

Check the Dial chart options below

We modify the options as below

• You can type the low and high range values for each range on the dial.
• In our case, we have defined the safety bad, ok and good values in our spreadsheet so when our goals change, we just change the spreadsheet and the dials will automatically take care. Also, what if we needed different goals for each month so rather than hard coding the range in the chart, we get them from the excel file

We first change the label sequence for the “Region Name” from “Bad” -> “Warning” -> to “Good”. For the dial chart the labels are not used so make sure that the colors are selected appropriately.

You may click on the color icon to change the colors of your choice

Next, we select the range boundary values

The safety_bad value from our spreadsheet represents the lower boundary of our bad region, “safety_ok” represents the upper boundary of our bad region, similarly ’safety_ok’ is the lower bound for our ‘ok’ region and so on. For the ‘Good’ upper bound we simply typed a value but as general practice we should have one more column for the upper bound of the final region. In our case the final region is ‘Safety Good’.

Next, for the pointer value, select the column that you want to show on the dial chart. In our case we select ‘Safety’ and aggregation as ‘Avg’

Next, we click on “Create chart”. This action shows the dialog below

We change the chart title to ‘Average Safety’

NOTE: remove the double quotes in the SQL statement for the group by. This will cause an error.

Click on ‘Fully Apply’

Here is our final Dial Chart

Next, create a dial chart to show current month value

We will change some conditions on the main Qlet. Right click on the “Name” and select ‘Duplicate’

It creates an exact copy of the qlet table. We change the name to ‘Current Month’

Right click on the ‘Period’ column and select ‘Create’ -> Create Date Filter

This action shows a dialog as shown below

First change the operator to ‘Between’

Next select ‘First Day of Month’ for the from and ‘Last Day of Month’ for the To val.

Click on ‘Use This Filter’

This action applies the filter to the Qlet and it shows only currrent month row

Next, right click on ‘Current Month’ and select ‘Create Chart’

All of the settings remain the same except the ‘Aggregation’, make sure to select ‘NONE’

Once all the three charts are done, we arrange them as below

Similarly, you may create the charts for “Quality” and “Revenue”

Convert Access dashboard to PHP based dashboard files so that you can easily share it on the internet or intranet.

Download the web dashboard files

• Web Dashboard Documentation

The documentation is a complete printable reference guide for converting desktop to web dashboard and has a reference section for chart properties to create advanced charts.

Download web dashboard software

• The link to the web dashboard software is provided within the above documentation link.
• download web dashboard software

This tutorial provides an alternative method to connect to the Excel Files. This method also applies to any new format of Excel Files or Microsoft Access databases (ie. mdb or .accdb)

Steps to Create DSN for ODBC connection

1. Click on the Start menu and click on the Control Panel

2. Click on the “Administrative Tools”.

NOTE: You may need to “Switch to Classic View” in windows Vista or newer version of your windows operating system

3. Click on the “Data Sources (ODBC)” setup icon

4. Click on “Add”

5. Select .xls, .xlsx .xlsm .xlsb option if you are using the latest Excel version and format of Excel

6.We will select the normal .XLS version since this northwind.xls file was created using old format

7. Give a short and simple name to this DSN entry

8. Now select and point this DSN name to the appropriate Excel file

9.

10. select the file and click OK. Close all the dialogs.

11. Now go back to InfoCaptor connection wizard

12. Select the “ODBC” option now instead of the “Excel” option

13. Give some simple name to this connection so that InfoCaptor can easily remember it

14. Type the ODBC name that was defined in the ODBC DSN setup screen previously

15.

Click on the Connect button and then you can proceed the remaining of this tutorial after the connection part

Free Dashboard PDF Tutorial

First open the file in access, give password, then From Tool->Security-> User and Group Permissions -> then select the table and for the admin account give it all kind of access. This will solve your access problems.

If yes, then how are you distributing the dashboards to your team?

The chances are that you are probably sending the entire bulky Excel file as attachment to your team, right?

Wouldn’t it be convenient to export the Excel dashboard to PDF and then just email the PDF?

Here are the steps to build a true Access Based Dashboard that has PDF and HTML export ability.

And the best thing is, you can put it on the webserver and then just provide the Dashboard URL to your team so they can interact with the dashboard in real time.

Export Excel Dashboard to PDF

In this tutorial, we will walk you through the steps in exporting the Access tables to a browsable HTML document.

Launch Access Dashboard Designer and click on the connect button

In the Driver, pick “MS Access .mdf.. “

Click on the “Access/Excel File” and pick the access .mdb file

Click on “Connect”

Click on the “New Blank Dashboard”

Give any descriptive name to the Dashboard

Next, it will show the Query browser and list all the available MS Access tables

Double click on any Table that you wish to export to HTML

Next, click on the alias field to select all the columns (you may select individual columns)

Click on the “Create Table” button

Click on the “Tree Browser icon” in the toolbar

Right click on the node name of the table,

Select ‘Export to HTML’

You may select “Queried Rows” or “All Rows” to HTML

Queried Rows: Will export whatever you have already queried in the dashboard. This means if you have put a restriction in the Qlet to pull only 100 records then it will export only 100 rows to HTML

All Rows: This will re-query the database and export all rows in the table to HTML

Here is the HTML output

You can output multiple tables in the same web page or html document

Goto Menu Create >> Query Builder

Click on the Reset Button

Now double click and bring any other tables you may need. Keep repeating the process until you have added all the tables on the dashboard.

Once added, rename the Qlet name by editing its properties (Hint: Right click on the “Name” title and select Edit)

Right click on Each node in the tree browser and select to include in the report

Now right click on the “Access Dashboard” node to export all the TAbles to HTML

This is the HTML output with the table names as bookmarks

Changing Colors, Formatting Data

With Access dashboard Designer, you get full control over the formatting options on each individual tables

Right click on the table name and select “Edit”

http://www.infocaptor.com/user_help/qlet_properties.htm

Download Access Dashboards

In this tutorial, we will walk you through the steps in exporting the Access tables to a browsable PDF document.

Launch Access Dashboard Designer and click on the connect button

In the Driver, pick “MS Access .mdf.. “

Click on the “Access/Excel File” and pick the access .mdb file

Click on “Connect”

Click on the “New Blank Dashboard”

Give any descriptive name to the Dashboard

Next, it will show the Query browser and list all the available MS Access tables

Double click on any Table that you wish to export to PDF

Next, click on the alias field to select all the columns (you may select individual columns)

Click on the “Create Table” button

Click on the “Tree Browser icon” in the toolbar

Right click on the node name of the table,

Select ‘Export to PDF’

You may select “Queried Rows” or “All Rows” to PDF

Queried Rows: Will export whatever you have already queried in the dashboard. This means if you have put a restriction in the Qlet to pull only 100 records then it will export only 100 rows to PDF

All Rows: This will re-query the database and export all rows in the table to PDF

Here is the PDF output

You can output multiple tables in the same pdf

Goto Menu Create >> Query Builder

Click on the Reset Button

Now double click and bring any other tables you may need. Keep repeating the process until you have added all the tables on the dashboard.

Once added, rename the Qlet name by editing its properties (Hint: Right click on the “Name” title and select Edit)

Right click on Each node in the tree browser and select to include in the report

Now right click on the “Access Dashboard” node to export all the TAbles to PDF

This is the PDF output with the table names as bookmarks

Changing Colors, Formatting Data

With Access dashboard Designer, you get full control over the formatting options on each individual tables

Right click on the table name and select “Edit”

http://www.infocaptor.com/user_help/qlet_properties.htm

Download Access Dashboards

In this example we are using the northwind sample database

Click on connect

Once connected it will open the Option wizard

Since there is no dashboard open, the “Build New Query” is disabled.

Click on the “New Blank Dashboard”

Enter some name for the dashboard “Northwind Dashboard”

Click OK

This Action immediately launches the Query Builder interface

Expand the node on the left

This displays a list of available tables

Double click on any table and it brings the table in the Query Builder window

You can now select columns and join then

To create joins, just drag the mouse on a column in the orders table. Once you see the join link appear you may release the mouse button. Now go to the second table and click on the column to which it needs to be joined.

Click on the SQL tab and you can see the SQL query that is automatically built for you

Now click on the “Create Table” button

This action creates a Qlet and places it in the dashboard

You can now right click on any column and create a drop down parameter

The parameter now automatically refreshes the qlet when you change the value