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How to Create a Metrics Dashboard in Excel with AI

Cody Schneider•

Building a metrics dashboard in Excel can feel like a rite of passage for anyone working in marketing, sales, or business operations. This article will show you how to create one, covering both the traditional manual methods and the newer, faster ways to use AI to speed up the process.

What is a Metrics Dashboard, Anyway?

Think of a metrics dashboard as a car's dashboard. It gives you a quick, at-a-glance view of your most important business metrics so you can see what's happening without digging through dense reports. It visualizes your key performance indicators (KPIs) in one place, usually on a single screen, using charts, graphs, and summary tables.

For a marketing team, this could mean tracking website traffic from Google Analytics, lead conversions from HubSpot, and ad spend from Facebook Ads. For an e-commerce store owner, it might be daily sales from Shopify, email open rates from Klaviyo, and customer lifetime value. The goal is simple: consolidate key numbers from different sources into one view to make faster, more informed decisions.

Building Your Dashboard Manually in Excel (The Classic Way)

Before jumping into AI assistants, it’s helpful to understand the manual process. This gives you a foundation for how dashboards are structured and why AI tools are so transformative. It's a bit tedious, but it works.

Step 1: Gather and Organize Your Data

This is often the most time-consuming step. Your data is likely scattered across multiple platforms. To get it into Excel, you'll need to manually export CSV files from each source - your Google Analytics data, your advertising platform reports, your CRM, etc.

Once you have your files, you need to clean and structure the data into a proper Excel Table. This makes it easier to analyze and ensures your formulas and charts update correctly as you add new data.

For example, your sales data should be organized with clear headers like:

  • Date

  • Customer Name

  • Region

  • Product

  • Sale Amount

To turn your data range into an official Excel Table, just click anywhere inside your data and press Ctrl+T (or Cmd+T on Mac). This disciplined format is your dashboard's foundation.

Step 2: Summarize Your Data with PivotTables

A PivotTable is Excel's powerhouse tool for summarizing large datasets without writing a single formula. It allows you to quickly group, sort, count, and average your data to pull out meaningful insights.

Let's say you want to see total sales by region. Instead of writing complex SUMIF formulas, you can create a PivotTable:

  1. Click anywhere inside your Excel Table.

  2. Go to the Insert tab and click PivotTable.

  3. Excel will automatically select your table range. Click OK to create the PivotTable in a new worksheet.

  4. Now, in the "PivotTable Fields" pane on the right, drag ‘Region’ to the Rows area and ‘Sale Amount’ to the Values area.

Instantly, you’ll have a clean summary table showing total sales for each region. You can create multiple PivotTables on the same sheet to summarize different metrics - revenue by product, sales per month, etc.

Step 3: Create Visualizations with PivotCharts

Numbers in a table are great, but charts make the data much easier to digest. A PivotChart is a chart that's directly linked to a PivotTable. When the PivotTable's data changes, the chart updates automatically.

To create one:

  1. Click on the PivotTable you just created.

  2. Go to the PivotTable Analyze tab and click PivotChart.

  3. Choose a chart type. A column chart is perfect for comparing sales by region. A line chart is ideal for showing sales trends over time. Click OK.

Repeat this process for each of your key metrics, creating different charts for each PivotTable you've built.

Step 4: Assemble Your Dashboard and Add Slicers

Now it's time to build the actual dashboard sheet.

  1. Create a fresh, blank worksheet in your Excel file.

  2. Go to each worksheet containing a PivotChart, copy the chart (Ctrl+C), and paste it (Ctrl+V) onto your new dashboard sheet. Arrange the charts in a visually appealing grid.

  3. To make your dashboard interactive, add Slicers. Slicers are user-friendly filter buttons that can control multiple PivotCharts at once.

  4. Click on one of your charts, go to the PivotChart Analyze tab, and click Insert Slicer. Choose the field you want to filter by, like 'Product' or 'Date'.

  5. To connect your slicer to all your charts, right-click the slicer, select Report Connections..., and check the boxes for all the PivotTables you want it to control.

Now, when you click a button on the slicer (e.g., select a specific product), all of your dashboard charts will update to show data only for that product. This transforms your static report into an interactive analysis tool.

Step 5: Design and Refine

Finally, clean up the presentation. On the View tab, uncheck "Gridlines" to give your dashboard a cleaner, report-like feel. Add a clear title at the top and give each chart a descriptive label. Consistency is key, so use a consistent color palette and font style.

And that’s it. You've built a functional - though entirely manual - Excel dashboard.

Using AI to Create Metrics Dashboards in Excel

The manual process works, but it’s slow. AI tools can dramatically speed things up, particularly when it comes to analyzing data and generating formulas or code. They won’t automate the data-gathering part, but they can act as a very smart assistant for the Excel build itself.

Method 1: Using ChatGPT for Formulas and VBA Scripts

Large language models like ChatGPT can be an excellent copilot for complex Excel tasks. Instead of trying to remember the syntax for a tricky formula or a VBA script, you can just ask for it in plain English.

Here are a few ways to use it:

  • For complex formulas: Let’s say your data has dates in column A and sales in column D, and you want to sum sales just for Q2 2024. Your prompt could be:"I have sales data in an Excel sheet. Column A is 'Date' and Column D is 'Sale Amount'. Write me an Excel formula to calculate the total Sale Amount for dates between April 1, 2024, and June 30, 2024."

  • For creating VBA scripts: If you want to automate repetitive tasks, you can ask for a VBA script. For example:"Write a VBA script for Excel that creates a PivotTable from the data on a sheet named 'SalesData'. The PivotTable should show the average 'Sale Amount' for each 'Region' and be placed on a new sheet named 'Pivot'."

Simply copy the code ChatGPT provides, open the VBA editor in Excel (Alt+F11), paste it, and run the macro. This can save you hours of manual clicking, but remember to always double-check the answers. AI can make mistakes, and you still need to understand the logic of what you’re asking it to do.

Method 2: Using Excel's Built-in 'Analyze Data' Feature

If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription, Excel has a built-in AI tool called "Analyze Data" that automates a lot of this for you. It examines your dataset and automatically suggests PivotTables, charts, and key insights.

How to use it:

  1. Click on any cell inside your data Table.

  2. On the Home tab, click the Analyze Data button on the far right.

  3. A pane will appear with AI-generated suggestions, like "Total Sale Amount by Region" or "Sale Amount trend over time." You can click a button to instantly insert any of these recommended PivotTables or charts into your workbook.

Even better, it includes a natural language query box where you can ask specific questions about your data:

  • "Show me total sales for the North region in a pie chart"

  • "Which product had the highest sales last month?"

  • "Sort regions by average sale amount"

Analyze Data is brilliant for quick discovery and one-off analysis, but it's less suited for building a permanent, highly customized dashboard you'll update every week.

The Obvious Limitations of Any Excel Dashboard

Whether you build it manually or with AI assistance, Excel dashboards fundamentally share the same limitations.

  • Data Is Instantly Outdated: Your dashboard is only as current as your last CSV export. To update it, you have to repeat the entire manual process of downloading reports from each platform, pasting the new data into Excel, and refreshing everything. Decisions are always based on past data, not real-time performance.

  • It's Incredibly Time-Consuming: The typical reporting cycle is a frantic race. Someone spends Monday downloading CSVs and wrangling them in Excel for a Tuesday meeting. By the time the dashboard is ready, half the week is gone.

  • Connecting Data Sources Is Painful: Excel wasn't built to blend data from different platforms seamlessly. If you want to see how your Facebook Ads spend relates to your Shopify sales, you're left stitching together two different spreadsheets, a process that is fragile and prone to errors.

  • Collaboration Is a Nightmare: Sharing Excel files via email quickly leads to version control chaos. Multiple people making edits results in files named "Dashboard_Report-v7_FINAL_USENEW_js-edits.xlsx," and no one is sure which one holds the truth.

Final Thoughts

Building a metrics dashboard in Excel is an invaluable skill. It forces you to understand your data, and methods have evolved from manual PivotTables to AI-powered helpers like Excel’s Analyze Data or external tools like ChatGPT. But regardless of method, they're all constrained by the problem of getting fresh, unified data into the spreadsheet in the first place.

We built Graphed because we believe getting a clear view of your business performance shouldn't be so manual. The real friction isn't creating the charts, it's the endless exporting, copying, and pasting from different platforms every week. We automate that entire process. Just connect your sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce once, then use plain English to ask us to build what you need: "Create a dashboard showing leads from HubSpot and ad spend from Google Ads last month." You get a live, interactive dashboard that updates in real-time without you lifting a finger, turning hours of tedious spreadsheet work into a 30-second task.