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Excel Interactive Dashboards and Data Analysis (Udemy.com)

Build interactive Excel dashboards with PivotTables, slicers and charts - answer business questions in minutes

Created by: Ian Littlejohn

Last updated September 2026

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What you will learn

  • Build a complete interactive Excel dashboard from raw data using PivotTables, PivotCharts and slicers
  • Structure your source data correctly first, so your PivotTables do not break when new data arrives
  • Filter and group data with Excel slicers, including one slicer driving more than one table at once
  • Run comparison, trend, ranking, contribution, variance and pareto analysis without writing a single formula
  • Follow a practical activity brief in every section, then check your work against a full video walkthrough
  • Use conditional formatting - highlight rules, top and bottom rules, data bars, color scales and icon sets
  • Apply best practice for table and graph design, so a manager can read your dashboard without you in the room
  • Build Sales, Human Resource and Finance dashboards end to end, from raw data to a working dashboard

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Course Description

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Every lesson in this course is written, created and recorded by me. AI is used only to help produce supporting images and written materials around the lessons.

Someone asks you which region is behind target, and which products are carrying it. You send a table. An hour later they ask the same question about a different quarter.

An interactive dashboard ends that loop. The person asking picks the region, the quarter and the product themselves, and the numbers move. You build it once.

This course shows you how to build one in Excel, using PivotTables, PivotCharts and slicers. No VBA, no add-ins, no code. If you can get your data into a table, you can build the dashboard.

WHAT YOU WILL BUILD

You start with raw transaction data and finish with a working Sales dashboard - key metrics across the top, a trend graph, a Top 10, contribution and variance analysis, and slicers that drive all of it at once.


COURSE CONTENT AND OUTCOMES

  • Structure your source data correctly, so your PivotTables do not break when new data arrives

  • Create PivotTables to summarize and aggregate data across several dimensions and measures

  • Filter with Excel slicers, including one slicer driving more than one table

  • Group data by date, value and text, and change the method of aggregation

  • Build trend and time analysis using date groups, fields, graphs and trend lines

  • Ask questions of your data - filter text, filter values, run Top 10 analysis

  • Run comparison, trend, ranking, contribution, variance and pareto analysis

  • Add calculations inside the PivotTable - percentage of, difference from

  • Use conditional formatting - highlight rules, top and bottom rules, data bars, color scales, icon sets

  • Apply best practice for dashboard layout, table design and graph design


HOW THE COURSE IS TAUGHT

Every section opens with a short spoken introduction, then works through the technique in videos of four to ten minutes. You then get a practical activity brief, you do it on the training data, and a full video walkthrough shows you how it was done. The training data files download in the first section, so you are working on the same data I am from the first lesson.

This course assumes you can already build a basic PivotTable. If you want PivotTables themselves in depth first, Complete Introduction to Excel Pivot Tables covers that ground.

ABOUT THE TRAINER

I have been training business people to work with data since 2008, and publishing on Udemy since 2013. Sixteen courses, more than 398,000 learners, and more than 139,000 reviews at an average rating of 4.6.

I specialise in training business users - not developers - to turn data into information they can act on, using Microsoft Excel, Copilot in Excel, Power Query, Power Pivot, Microsoft Power BI, Looker Studio and Amazon QuickSight.

Everything is downloadable, you can work at your own pace, and the dashboard you build is yours to point at your own data. Let's get started.

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Instructor Details

Ian Littlejohn

I specialise in training business users to learn powerful methods and techniques to transform data into useful information and intelligence as well as learning strong data analysis methodology.


I completed my university degree in economics and emerged keen and eager to change the world. I spent the first half of my career working for multinational companies, on projects of various sizes, in different sectors, all revolving around analysing data of some sort and working with different software products, including Microsoft Excel.


I found that so many Excel users had a very basic understanding of how Excel works, and instead of using Excel to do the work for them, were doing all the work themselves, using old spreadsheet technology like macros instead of embracing technology like Pivot Tables. Pivot Tables were actually introduced into Excel in 1994 but many Excel users have avoided using them because they seem complicated and difficult to use.


In 2008 I decided to start my own training company and this was borne out of the passion I had to teach Excel users how to work smarter, not harder. As technology evolved, and new systems developed, I continuously expanded my training to include Power BI, Amazon QuickSight, Looker Studio, and most recently Copilot in Excel and Microsoft 365 Copilot.


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Reviews

4.6

7,109 ratings on Udemy

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By Fay Ogbonna on 4/1/2026

I love this class! I have learned so much. This content is exactly what I needed. The delivery is excellent for anyone who needs a refresher or learning how to build interactive dashboards. The practices are helpful with testing my knowledge. Well done!

By Anonymized User on 12/22/2023

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to attend this course! Microsoft Excel is one of the applications I spend most of my working time with. I enjoyed working in parallel with the presentation because it made it easier to practice, correct my actions where necessary and actively participate in the learning process. Congratulations on creating and delivering a robust piece. I look forward to doing more of your training next year! :)

By Stergios Sozos on 7/26/2021

This was a very interesting course, and the tutor did communicate the important things to us. In some parts I felt that he went in too much details that could have been avoided. Not a minus, as it is always useful, but I wouldnt bother if I didnt see it.

By Beverly Flick on 4/15/2021

This was a very good introduction to dashboards. I particularly liked how the instructor showed several methods to accomplish the same task rather than just using his preferred method. I also appreciated his explaining why you don't want to select certain options rather than just showing you the correct way.

By Aneed Hasan on 11/12/2020

It's a great course. It is catered more towards the beginners. But overall a good experience and good learning. It's great if you are new to MS Excel charts, visualizations and creating dashboards. I took it as a refresher and it was worth it.

By Paola Orsetta PedullĂ  on 10/9/2020

The course could have been more challenging: some functionalities can be picked up by the user individually, without having to take the course. However, especially with reference to the construction of dashboards, it gives useful tools

By Amparo F. on 6/10/2020

I found this course very useful, easy to follow and very well explained. The content and the structure, the practical exercises, and the summaries are really well thought through and cover a good range of features and functions in Excel for creating Dashboards and Data Analysis, as promised. The transcripts need to be reviewed though :-) Thank you, Ian!

By Oliver Jaeschke on 3/16/2020

The start was for me really on the easy side. But now I have seen some functions, which I used or reached in other ways, but could be achieved much simpler. Bringing all the tools together at the end gave me powerful techniques for my future work.

By Kathleen D Frezza on 6/20/2019

Easy to understand and informative. Very good class--I learned a lot. The instructor moves fast, but because it is online, I can stop the video and review it again. I watched a couple of segments more than once to solidify my understanding of the concepts. Thank you.

By Tina Chen Vernon on 7/25/2018

I really like the detail, and the best of the lessons. I really like when stop, and explain the additional formulas to help you quickly clean up your data. Excellent paste of detail and I'm able to grasp the understanding of the class. So far....:-) Thank you

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Overall Score : 92 / 100