Graphed LogoGraphed
Login

How to Create a KPI Dashboard in Excel with ChatGPT

Cody Schneider•

Building a powerful KPI dashboard in Excel used to mean hours spent wrestling with complex formulas and pivot tables. Now, you can slash that time by using ChatGPT as your personal data analyst. This guide will show you how to leverage AI to plan, build, and design a functional KPI dashboard in Excel, turning a days-long project into a task you can tackle this afternoon.

First, Let's Plan Your KPI Dashboard

Before you write a single formula or create a single chart, a great dashboard starts with a clear plan. Answering these questions first will save you headaches later and ensure your final product is actually useful.

Step 1: Define Your Goals and Audience

Who is this dashboard for, and what single question do they need answered at a glance? Avoid the temptation to cram every metric you can find onto one screen. A great dashboard has a specific purpose.

  • For a sales manager: The main goal might be to track team performance. The key question is, "Are we on track to hit our quarterly sales targets?"

  • For a marketing lead: The purpose might be to measure campaign ROI. The key question is, "Which marketing channels are driving the most revenue?"

  • For a founder: The goal is a high-level business health check. The central question is, "Are we growing profitably?"

Knowing your audience dictates which metrics you'll choose and how you'll present them.

Step 2: Select Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Once you know your goal, choose 5-7 core KPIs that directly answer your central question. KPIs are the specific, measurable metrics that track your progress towards a goal. Lagging indicators (what happened) and leading indicators (what might happen) are both useful.

Here are some examples for different teams:

  • Sales Team: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Sales Target vs. Actual, Lead-to-Close Rate.

  • Marketing Team: Website Conversion Rate, Cost Per Lead (CPL), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

  • E-commerce Store: Average Order Value (AOV), Cart Abandonment Rate, Monthly Sales, Top Selling Products.

Step 3: Sketch Your Dashboard Layout

Grab a pen and paper or a whiteboarding tool and sketch out a rough layout. Where will your most important numbers go? How will you group related charts? A simple visual plan makes the building process much smoother.

  • Top-Left is Prime Real Estate: Place your most critical KPI (like total revenue or conversion rate) in the top-left corner, as this is where an eye naturally falls first.

  • Group Logically: Keep marketing spend charts near marketing performance charts. Place sales pipeline metrics together.

  • Tell a Story: Arrange your visuals to guide the viewer from a high-level overview down to more granular details.

Setting Up Your Excel File for Success

Organization is key. An orderly Excel file is easier to manage, update, and troubleshoot. We'll use a three-tab structure for our dashboard.

  1. Open a new Excel workbook.

  2. Create three separate worksheets and name them:

    • Data: This is where all your raw data will live. Nothing else goes here.

    • Calculations: This is your "engine room" where you'll perform all your calculations and create pivot tables that feed the dashboard.

    • Dashboard: This is the final, presentation-ready report that will contain all your charts and visualizations.

For this tutorial, let's assume we're working with a simple sales dataset. Go to your Data tab and paste or import your data. Let's imagine it looks something like this:

Column A: OrderDate | Column B: ProductCategory | Column C: Revenue | Column D: MarketingSource

Using ChatGPT to Write Your Excel Formulas

This is where the magic happens. Instead of googling archaic formula syntax, you can just ask ChatGPT for what you need in plain English. For the most accurate results, be specific about your file setup.

Example 1: Calculating a Basic KPI

Let's calculate the total revenue for the current month. Head over to your Calculations tab.

Your Prompt to ChatGPT:

"I have an Excel sheet where my raw sales data is in a tab named 'Data'. Column A is 'OrderDate' and Column C is 'Revenue'. Give me an Excel formula to calculate the total revenue for just the current month."

ChatGPT's Likely Response:

You can use the SUMIFS function for this. This formula sums the revenue for all orders that fall within the current month.

=SUMIFS(Data!C:C, Data!A:A, ">= " & EOMONTH(TODAY(),-1)+1, Data!A:A, "<= " & EOMONTH(TODAY(),0))

Simply copy this formula, paste it into a cell on your Calculations tab, and label it "This Month's Revenue." ChatGPT handled the tricky date logic for you.

Example 2: A More Complex KPI Calculation

Now, let's find the revenue generated specifically from our "Facebook Ads" marketing source.

Your Prompt to ChatGPT:

"Using the same 'Data' tab (Column C is 'Revenue', Column D is 'MarketingSource'), give me an Excel formula to sum all revenue where the marketing source is 'Facebook Ads'."

ChatGPT's Likely Response:

Here’s a simple SUMIF formula to achieve that:

=SUMIF(Data!D:D, "Facebook Ads", Data!C:C)

Paste this into another cell on your Calculations sheet. You can quickly repeat this for "Google Ads," "Email Marketing," and other sources to build out a comparison table.

Pro Tip: Ask ChatGPT to Build a Pivot Table Plan

For more complex summaries, like monthly revenue by product category, a PivotTable is your best bet.

Your Prompt to ChatGPT:

"I want to create a PivotTable in Excel to summarize monthly revenue by product category. My data is in the 'Data' tab with headers in Row 1. Column A is 'OrderDate', B is 'ProductCategory', and C is 'Revenue'. Where should I put the fields in the PivotTable setup?"

ChatGPT will guide you: "Based on your data, configure your PivotTable Fields like this:

  • Drag ProductCategory to the Rows area.

  • Drag OrderDate to the Columns area (Excel should automatically group this by month).

  • Drag Revenue to the Values area (ensure it's set to Sum of Revenue)."

Follow these instructions on your Calculations page to instantly create a powerful data summary table.

Creating Visualizations with Help from ChatGPT

With your KPIs calculated, it's time to visualize them on your dashboard. ChatGPT can't create the charts directly, but it can provide excellent advice on chart selection and even write VBA scripts to automate their creation.

Step 1: Get Chart Recommendations

Unsure which chart to use? Just ask.

Your Prompt to ChatGPT:

"I have summarized my monthly revenue for the past year. What is the best Excel chart type to show this trend over time?"

ChatGPT will likely suggest a line chart or a column chart, explaining that they are ideal for showing data evolution across a continuous period like time.

Step 2: Automate Chart Creation with VBA

If you have several charts to create, you can use ChatGPT to write a VBA macro (a simple script) to do it for you. This sounds intimidating, but it's as simple as copy-and-paste.

First, make sure the Developer tab is visible in Excel (File > Options > Customize Ribbon > Check Developer).

Your Prompt to ChatGPT:

"Write me an Excel VBA script to create a clean line chart. The data is in the 'Calculations' tab in the range A2:B13, with month names in column A and revenue in column B. The final chart should be placed on the 'Dashboard' sheet."

ChatGPT will generate a code block like this:

To use this, simply go to your Developer tab in Excel, click Macros, give your macro a name ('CreateRevenueLineChart'), click Create, and paste the code ChatGPT gave you. When you run the macro, your chart will instantly appear on your dashboard.

Design Tips for a Clean and Professional Dashboard

A well-designed dashboard is easier to read and immediately conveys professionalism. ChatGPT can be your design consultant.

Your Prompt to ChatGPT:

"Give me 5 best practices for designing a clean, professional-looking KPI dashboard in Excel."

You’ll get tips back like:

  • Use a Quiet Color Palette: Stick to neutral backgrounds (light gray or white) and use color intentionally to highlight key data points. Avoid using a rainbow of colors.

  • Remove Chart Clutter: Remove unnecessary borders, gridlines, and labels from your charts to make the data stand out.

  • Align Everything: Use Excel's alignment tools (Shape Format > Align) to ensure all your charts and text boxes line up perfectly. A clean grid looks professional.

  • Add Interactivity with Slicers: Once you have a PivotTable, you can add Slicers (PivotTable Analyze > Insert Slicer). Slicers are interactive buttons that filter your dashboard data, allowing users to drill down by product, region, or date range. Ask ChatGPT: "How do I connect a slicer to multiple PivotTables in Excel?" to make your whole dashboard dynamic.

  • Consistent Fonts and Sizing: Use one or two font types at most. Use font size to create a clear hierarchy between titles, subtitles, and body text.

Final Thoughts

Pairing your knowledge of your business with ChatGPT's technical prowess creates a powerful combination. Instead of getting bogged down in the how-to of complex formulas or scripting, you can focus on the "what" - defining the right KPIs and telling the right data story to help your business grow. This approach turns Excel from a daunting spreadsheet tool into an agile platform for generating critical business insights.

While building your own custom dashboard in Excel is incredibly rewarding, the process still requires manual data gathering and regular updates. For those who want to skip the setup and get straight to the insights, this is where we designed Graphed to help. We automate the entire process by connecting directly to your data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Facebook Ads. Just tell us what you want to see - "show me our Shopify revenue vs. Facebook ad spend for the last 90 days" - and we build a live, interactive dashboard for you in seconds, no formulas required.