How to Make a Good Report in Excel

Building a valuable report in Excel doesn't have to feel like wrestling a giant spreadsheet into submission. The secret isn't knowing every obscure formula, but in having a clear process that takes you from raw data to actionable insights. This guide will walk you through a simple, step-by-step framework for creating reports that are clear, insightful, and easy for anyone to understand.

Start with Why: Define Your Report's Purpose

Before you even open Excel, the most critical step is to pause and ask a few simple questions. Skipping this is like starting a road trip without a destination - you’ll burn a lot of fuel and end up nowhere useful. Your goal is to move from data points to a clear story.

Ask yourself:

• What is the main question I need to answer? Are you trying to see which marketing campaigns are most profitable? Are you tracking monthly sales against a target? A single, clear question will focus your efforts. A report trying to answer everything will likely answer nothing well.
• Who is my audience? A report for your CEO needs a high-level overview with key takeaways, while a report for the marketing team might need more granular detail on campaign performance. Tailor the complexity and detail to who will be reading it.
• What action do I want them to take? Good reports drive decisions. Do you want your reader to double down on a successful ad channel, adjust sales targets, or investigate a drop in website traffic? Keep the desired outcome in mind.

Having clear answers to these questions will be your north star throughout the entire creation process.

Step 1: Gather and Clean Your Data

Great analysis depends on good data, but data rarely arrives in a perfect format. Most of your time will likely be spent right here, in the cleanup phase. This isn’t the most glamorous part, but it's the foundation of a trustworthy report.

Collect Your Raw Data

Your data might come from various places - a CSV export from Salesforce, Google Analytics, Shopify, or even a manually maintained spreadsheet. The goal is to get all the data you need into one place. For best results, keep your raw data on a separate, dedicated tab in your Excel workbook. Never work directly on your master data source, always make a copy to analyze.

Format Your Data as a Table

This is the single best tip for working with data in Excel. Once your data is in a sheet, click anywhere inside your data set and press Ctrl + T (or Cmd + T on Mac). This converts your range into an official Excel Table.

Why is this so important?

• It's dynamic: As you add new rows of data, your formulas and PivotTables connected to this table will automatically update. No more manually adjusting ranges.
• Improved readability: You get built-in formatting with alternating colored rows, making it easier to scan.
• Easy sorting and filtering: Filter arrows are automatically added to each column header.

Clean Up the Mess

Messy data leads to inaccurate reports. Here are a few essential cleaning tasks:

• Remove Duplicates: With your table selected, go to the Data tab and click Remove Duplicates to get rid of any identical rows.
• Find & Replace: Use a simple Find & Replace (Ctrl + H) to fix inconsistencies. For example, you might have "USA," "US," and "United States" in your country column. Standardize them to a single format.
• Check Your Formats: Ensure numbers are formatted as numbers and dates are formatted as dates. Excel can sometimes misinterpret these, which will cause issues with calculations and timelines.
• Handle Blank Cells: Decide what to do with empty cells. Should they be zero? Or should the row be deleted? Leaving them blank can sometimes cause errors in your calculations or charts.

Step 2: Summarize and Analyze Your Data

With clean, organized data, you can now start to pull out the insights. For this, you don't need to be a formula wizard. Excel’s PivotTables are your best friend for quickly summarizing a mountain of data.

The Magic of PivotTables

A PivotTable is an interactive tool that lets you summarize large data sets by simply dragging and dropping fields. It lets you slice and dice your data to find patterns without writing a single formula.

Here’s how to create one:

1. Click anywhere inside your formatted Excel Table.
2. Go to the Insert tab and click PivotTable.
3. Excel will automatically select your table and prompt you to place the PivotTable in a new worksheet. Click OK.
4. A new sheet will open with a PivotTable Fields panel on the right. This is where you build your summary.

Imagine you have sales data with columns for Region, Product, and Sales Amount. To see a summary of sales by region, you would drag:

• Region into the Rows area.
• Sales Amount into the Values area.

Instantly, Excel generates a clean table showing total sales for each region. You could then drag Product into the Columns area to see a breakdown of which products are selling in which regions. It's that simple.

Key Formulas for Quick Insights

While PivotTables are fantastic for exploration, sometimes you need a more static calculation. The "IFS" family of functions is perfect for this.

• SUMIFS: Sums a range based on one or more criteria. Example: total sales for a specific product and region.
• COUNTIFS: Counts cells based on multiple criteria. Example: number of deals closed by a specific salesperson in a particular month.
• AVERAGEIFS: Calculates the average of a range based on criteria. Example: the average order value for a certain customer segment.

Step 3: Visualize Your Findings with Charts

People understand pictures faster than numbers. A well-designed chart can make your key findings obvious in seconds, whereas the same information in a table might take minutes to decipher. The key is to choose the right chart for the job.

• Bar/Column Chart: The best choice for comparing categories. Use it to compare sales by region, traffic by marketing channel, or performance across sales reps.
• Line Chart: Perfect for showing a trend over time. Use it to track website sessions per month, revenue over a quarter, or anything you want to see the rise and fall of.
• Pie Chart: Use these with caution! They are only effective for showing the composition of a whole when you have very few categories (ideally less than 5). A bar chart is often a better alternative.

Tips for great-looking charts:

• Give it a clear title. Instead of "Sales", use "Q3 Sales by Region". Answer the reader's question directly.
• Label your axes. Make it obvious what the numbers and categories represent.
• Remove clutter. Ditch unnecessary gridlines, borders, and distracting background colors. Let the data be the star of the show.

Step 4: Build Your Reporting Dashboard

A great report often culminates in a dashboard - a single sheet that provides an at-a-glance view of the most important metrics and charts. The goal here is accessibility and clarity.

1. Create a new sheet and name it something like "Dashboard" or "Summary".
2. Copy and paste your finalized charts from your analysis sheets onto this dashboard.
3. Add key performance indicators (KPIs) at the top. These are the big, show-stopping numbers like Total Revenue, Total Leads, or Conversion Rate. You can simply link these cells back to your PivotTables or formula calculations.
4. Arrange everything in a logical flow. The most important information should be at the top left, as that’s where people naturally look first.

To make your dashboard interactive, add Slicers. Slicers are user-friendly buttons that filter your PivotTable data. Select a chart connected to a PivotTable, go to the PivotChart Analyze tab, and click Insert Slicer. Choose a field like "Year" or "Region," and a clickable filter will appear on your dashboard. Now, users can easily click to view data for just a specific region or time period.

Final Thoughts

Transforming a spreadsheet from a grid of data into a powerful report comes down to a clear, repeatable process. By starting with a clear objective, taking the time to clean your data, using tools like PivotTables for analysis, and visualizing the results with simple charts, you can create reports that drive real business decisions.

This traditional process in Excel is powerful, but it's also manual, time-consuming, and needs to be repeated every time you get new data. When it comes to tracking real-time performance across sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and various ad platforms, we found this workflow too slow. That’s why we built Graphed. It automates this entire process by connecting directly to your marketing and sales data sources, allowing you to instantly create live, interactive dashboards by just describing what you want to see in plain English - no more exporting CSVs or wrestling with PivotTables.