Graphed LogoGraphed
Login

How to Create a Business Dashboard in Excel with ChatGPT

Cody Schneider•

Creating a business dashboard in Excel is a great way to visualize your key metrics, but starting with a blank spreadsheet can feel daunting. This guide will walk you through using ChatGPT as an expert assistant to build a powerful and dynamic Excel dashboard, helping with everything from defining your goals to writing complex formulas.

First, What Kinds of Dashboards Can You Build?

Excel is remarkably flexible, and with ChatGPT’s help, you can build almost any kind of dashboard to track performance. Here are a few common examples:

  • Sales Dashboard: To track metrics like revenue vs. target, deals in the pipeline, conversion rates, and performance by sales rep.

  • Marketing Dashboard: To monitor website traffic, ad spend, conversion rates, cost per acquisition (CPA), and campaign ROI.

  • Financial Dashboard: To visualize key financial health indicators like profit and loss, cash flow, revenue streams, and operating expenses.

  • Project Management Dashboard: To keep an eye on project timelines, budget vs. actual spend, resource allocation, and task completion rates.

How ChatGPT Changes the Game for Excel Users

ChatGPT doesn’t plug directly into Excel, but it acts like a brilliant data analyst sitting next to you. Instead of spending hours hunting through forums for the right formula or trying to remember how to build a pivot table, you can just ask.

Here’s how it helps:

  • Writes Formulas for You: From simple SUM functions to complex, multi-level INDEX(MATCH) or SUMIFS formulas, you can describe what you need in plain English and get a ready-to-use formula.

  • Cleans Your Data: Got messy data? ChatGPT can give you formulas to standardize date formats, remove extra spaces, or split text from one cell into multiple columns.

  • Suggests Visualizations: Not sure whether to use a line chart or a bar chart? Describe your data and your goal, and ChatGPT will recommend the best chart type and explain why.

  • Writes VBA Scripts: For a more advanced dashboard, you can ask ChatGPT to write VBA code to automate repetitive tasks, like refreshing your data or formatting reports with a single click.

Step-by-Step: Build a Sales Dashboard in Excel with ChatGPT

Let's walk through an example of building a simple sales dashboard. The same principles apply whether you're building a dashboard for marketing, finance, or operations.

Step 1: Define Your Goal and KPIs

Every good dashboard starts with a question. Before you touch any data, figure out what you need to know. For our sales dashboard, our goal is to understand Q3 performance. The key questions are:

  • What is our total revenue for the quarter?

  • Who are our top-performing sales reps?

  • Which products are selling the most?

  • How are we tracking against our quarterly sales target?

If you're unsure which KPIs to track, you can ask ChatGPT for ideas. Be specific about your business and goals.

Example Prompt for ChatGPT: "I'm building a quarterly sales dashboard in Excel for my B2B SaaS company. My main goal is to track monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and new customer acquisition. What are 5 essential KPIs I should include?"

Step 2: Gather and Structure Your Data

Your dashboard is only as good as the data feeding it. Best practice is to organize your Excel workbook into three separate tabs:

  1. Data Tab (e.g., 'SalesData'): This is where your raw, unedited data lives. This might be a CSV export from your CRM. The key is to keep this data pristine.

  2. Calculation Tab (e.g., 'Calculations'): This is a helper sheet where you’ll put summary tables, pivot tables, and calculations that will feed your charts. This keeps your dashboard clean.

  3. Dashboard Tab (e.g., 'Dashboard'): This is the final, visual front-end where only your charts, graphs, and summary numbers will be displayed.

Often, your raw data will be messy. ChatGPT is a huge help here. Let's say your sales data has a column with the client's name and location combined, like "Company A (New York)." You want to separate them.

Example Prompt for ChatGPT: "In Excel, I have a column (A) with text like 'Company A (New York)'. I need a formula to extract just the location 'New York' from the parentheses into a new column. The location is always inside the final set of parentheses."

ChatGPT will likely return a formula you can paste into your sheet:

=MID(A2, FIND("(", A2) + 1, FIND(")", A2) - FIND("(", A2) - 1)

Step 3: Ask ChatGPT for Formulas to Summarize Your Data

Now, let’s use the 'Calculations' tab to summarize information from the 'SalesData' tab. This is where ChatGPT shines. Instead of struggling with syntax, just describe the calculation you need.

Let's assume our 'SalesData' sheet has columns for 'Date', 'Sales Rep', 'Product', and 'Revenue'. Here are a few prompts you could use:

Calculating Total Revenue:

"Write me an Excel formula to calculate the sum of all values in the 'Revenue' column (Column D) on a sheet named 'SalesData'."

=SUM(SalesData!D:D)

Finding Top Sales Rep Revenue:

"On my 'SalesData' sheet, I have 'Sales Rep' names in Column B and their 'Revenue' in Column D. On my 'Calculations' sheet, cell A2 contains the name 'John Smith'. Write a formula to sum John Smith's total revenue from the 'SalesData' sheet."

=SUMIF(SalesData!B:B, A2, SalesData!D:D)

Calculating Progress Towards a Goal:

"My total quarterly revenue is calculated in cell B2 on my 'Calculations' sheet. My quarterly sales target of $150,000 is written in cell B3. Write me an Excel formula to show the percentage of the target achieved."

=B2/B3

Simply copy these formulas into your 'Calculations' sheet. You can use these calculated cells to power the charts and key metrics on your main dashboard.

Step 4: Design Your Dashboard and Create Charts

Now for the fun part: visualizing the data on your 'Dashboard' tab. First, link the key metrics. In a cell on your dashboard, simply type = and then click on the corresponding cell in your 'Calculations' sheet (e.g., =Calculations!B2). This will display your total revenue number.

Next, let's create some charts. Once again, ChatGPT can act as your advisor.

Example Prompt: "I have a summary table of monthly sales revenue for the past 12 months in Excel. What is the best chart type to show this trend over time? A line chart or a stacked column chart? Explain why."

ChatGPT would advise that a line chart is perfect for showing trends over continuous time periods. For comparing revenue by sales rep or product, it would likely recommend a bar chart. To show the composition of total sales by product category, it would suggest a pie chart or donut chart.

Arrange these charts and your KPI cards neatly on your dashboard. Use clear headings for each chart and keep the design simple and easy to read. Adding slicers for pivot charts can make your dashboard interactive, allowing users to filter data by sales rep, product, or region.

Step 5 (Advanced): Automate with VBA

Manually refreshing data can get tedious. If you want your dashboard to update with one click, you can use a bit of VBA code. Don’t worry if you’ve never written code before - you can just ask ChatGPT for it.

Example Prompt: "Write me an Excel VBA macro that will refresh all pivot tables in the active workbook. Assign it to a button on my 'Dashboard' sheet."

ChatGPT will provide the code and step-by-step instructions on how to add it to your workbook and create a button to trigger it. This simple piece of automation can save you a lot of time each week.

Best Practices for Using ChatGPT with Excel

  • Be Specific: The more detail you provide, the better the result. Mention your sheet names, column headers, and cell ranges (e.g., "in cell A1 on sheet 'SalesData'").

  • Provide Context: Tell it your overall goal. It helps the AI give you not just an answer, but the right answer for your situation.

  • Ask it to "Explain": If you get a complex formula, ask ChatGPT to explain how it works step-by-step. This is a great way to learn and become a better Excel user.

  • Always Do a Sanity Check: AI is powerful, but not perfect. Always double-check formulas and numbers to make sure they're pulling the correct data and calculating it as you expect.

Final Thoughts

Using ChatGPT as a data analysis assistant can transform how you build reports in Excel. It bridges the knowledge gap, helps you write perfect formulas in seconds, automates tedious work, and empowers you to build professional-grade dashboards without becoming an Excel guru overnight.

While this approach makes a typically manual process much faster, it still depends on you exporting CSVs and refreshing data by hand. If you're tired of that cycle, we designed Graphed to completely remove the friction. Instead of exporting data, you connect your sources (like HubSpot, Shopify, or Google Analytics) directly, and we keep the data in sync automatically. Then, just like with ChatGPT, you ask for dashboards in plain English and get stunning, real-time visuals in seconds.