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How to Create a Product Management Dashboard in Excel with ChatGPT

Cody Schneider•

Creating a product management dashboard in Excel often feels like a necessary evil. While it gives you a flexible canvas to track key metrics, the manual effort of wrangling data, remembering complex formulas, and building charts can consume hours you don't have. This article will show you how to use ChatGPT as an intelligent assistant to dramatically speed up this process, from planning your dashboard to generating the exact formulas and even automation scripts you need.

Why Use Excel for a Product Dashboard?

Before jumping into the "how," it's worth acknowledging why Excel remains a popular choice for product managers, despite the rise of more modern BI tools. It's familiar, highly customizable, and nearly every organization already has it. For a quick, one-off analysis or a simple dashboard you can send offline, it's hard to beat.

However, that flexibility comes with costs:

  • It's a manual process: Data doesn't update itself. Most Excel dashboards rely on you manually downloading CSVs from various sources (like your product analytics tool, CRM, or user survey platform) and pasting them into the spreadsheet.

  • Prone to error: One incorrect copy-paste or a broken formula can throw off your entire report, leading to misguided decisions based on faulty data.

  • Reports are static: An Excel dashboard is a snapshot in time. By the time your team reviews it in a meeting, the data is already old.

Understanding these limitations is important. We'll use ChatGPT to smooth over the manual parts, but we'll also touch on how to move beyond these constraints entirely.

Planning Your Product Management Dashboard

A good dashboard starts with clear goals, not a sprawling spreadsheet. Throwing every possible metric onto a page just creates noise. Before you write a single formula, start here.

1. Define Your Key Questions

What decisions do you need to make? Your dashboard should be built to answer specific, critical questions about your product. For example:

  • Are new users successfully completing the onboarding process?

  • Which features are our most engaged users adopting?

  • What is our trial-to-paid conversion rate, and is it trending up or down?

  • Is customer satisfaction (NPS/CSAT) improving after our latest release?

  • How is our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) growing?

Pick 3-5 high-priority questions. This focus will keep your dashboard clean and actionable.

2. Identify Your Core Metrics

Once you have your questions, the corresponding metrics become obvious. These are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you'll track.

  • For user engagement: Daily Active Users (DAU), Monthly Active Users (MAU), Feature Adoption Rate, Session Duration.

  • For business growth: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Churn Rate, Trial Conversion Rate.

  • For customer satisfaction: Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Number of support tickets.

List out exactly what you'll need. This list will guide your data gathering and eventual dashboard layout.

3. Sketch Your Layout

Seriously, grab a piece of paper or open a whiteboard tool and draw a rough sketch of your dashboard. Where will the main KPIs go? How will you group charts? A simple sketch helps you visualize the relationships between different metrics before you get stuck in the weeds of cell formatting.

Your Step-by-Step Guide to Building the Dashboard with ChatGPT

With your plan in place, it's time to build. Here's how you can use ChatGPT as your co-pilot to translate your vision into a functional Excel dashboard.

Step 1: Gather and Structure Your Data

This is the one step ChatGPT can't do for you. You need to export your raw data from its sources. A best practice is to structure your workbook with separate tabs:

  • A 'Raw Data - Users' Tab: Export your user data. Keep it clean and unformatted. Each row is a user, and each column is an attribute like UserID, SignupDate, SubscriptionStatus, MRR, LastLoginDate.

  • A 'Raw Data - Events' Tab: Export data for feature usage or in-app events. Columns could be EventID, UserID, EventDate, FeatureName.

  • A 'Dashboard' Tab: This will be the clean, presentable sheet where your charts and summary tables live. It will pull all its information from your other tabs.

Putting raw data on separate tabs keeps your dashboard organized and less prone to breaking when you update it with new information.

Step 2: Use ChatGPT to Generate Excel Formulas

This is where the magic starts. Instead of fumbling with VLOOKUPs or trying to remember the syntax for COUNTIFS, you can just ask ChatGPT in plain English.

To get good results, provide clear context. Mention the tab name, the columns involved, and what you want to calculate.

Example 1: Calculating Your MAU

Let's say you want to count your Monthly Active Users on your dashboard. You have a tab named 'User_Data' with LastLoginDate in Column F.

Your prompt to ChatGPT could be:

"I'm building a dashboard in Excel. I have a tab called 'User_Data' where Column F contains the last login date for each user. On my 'Dashboard' tab, I want to calculate the number of users who logged in during October 2023. Cell A1 on my Dashboard tab contains the date '2023-10-01'. Write an Excel formula for me."

ChatGPT's likely response:

=COUNTIFS(User_Data!F:F, ">=" & Dashboard!A1, User_Data!F:F, "<=" & EOMONTH(Dashboard!A1, 0))

This formula is perfect. It counts entries in the date column that are greater than or equal to the first of the month and less than or equal to the end of that month. You just saved yourself a few minutes of head-scratching and testing.

Example 2: Calculating Feature Adoption Rate

Let's try something more complex. You want to see the adoption rate for a new feature called "Auto-Scheduler."

Your prompt to ChatGPT:

"I have an Excel workbook with two tabs: 'User_Data' and 'Event_Data'. 'User_Data' has a complete list of UserIDs in Column A. 'Event_Data' has UserID in Column A and FeatureName in Column C. Write a single formula to calculate the adoption rate for the 'Auto-Scheduler' feature. The rate is (unique users who used the feature) / (total unique users)."

ChatGPT might use a combination of newer formulas like UNIQUE and FILTER.

ChatGPT's likely response:

=(COUNTA(UNIQUE(FILTER(Event_Data!A:A, Event_Data!C:C="Auto-Scheduler")))) / COUNTA(UNIQUE(User_Data!A:A))

This single command just created a powerful, dynamic formula that would have been tricky to engineer manually. You'd then format this cell as a percentage to see your final rate.

Step 3: Creating Visualizations with ChatGPT's Help

While ChatGPT can't directly create a chart in your Excel sheet, it can act as an expert consultant, telling you exactly how to do it.

First, use a few simple formulas (that you just generated!) to create a small summary table on your dashboard tab - this will drive the chart.

For example, a table showing a monthly user trend:

  • Jan-23 | 5,430

  • Feb-23 | 5,890

  • Mar-23 | 6,120

Your prompt to ChatGPT:

"I have a two-column summary table in Excel on my 'Dashboard' tab from cell A5 to B17. Column A has the month and Column B has the number of active users. I want to create a trend line chart from this data. Tell me the exact steps to do this in Excel."

ChatGPT would then provide simple, bulleted instructions, reminding you to select the data, go to the 'Insert' tab, choose 'Line Chart,' and guide you through basic formatting tips.

Step 4: Automating Updates with VBA Macros

For more advanced users, here's where you can save even more time. Let's say part of your dashboard uses PivotTables. Instead of manually refreshing them every time you paste in new data, you can build a one-click macro to do it for you - without knowing how to write any code.

Your prompt to ChatGPT:

"Write an Excel VBA macro script that refreshes all the PivotTables in the entire workbook. Also, add a message box that says 'Dashboard Refreshed!' when it's done."

ChatGPT's likely response:

`Sub RefreshAllPivotTables() Dim pc As PivotCache Dim ws As Worksheet

End Sub`

You can simply open the VBA editor in Excel (ALT + F11), paste this code in as a new module, and then create a button on your dashboard that runs this macro. All without writing a single line of code yourself.

The Obvious Limitations: Where This Process Breaks Down

As slick as this is, the core problems with Excel dashboards remain.

The biggest issue is that the data is stale. Your beautiful dashboard is only as current as your last manual CSV export and paste. If your CEO asks a follow-up question in a meeting, you can't just drill down or explore the live data. The answer is "I'll have to get back to you," followed by another round of data wrangling.

Additionally, while ChatGPT is a powerful assistant, it relies on you to perfectly describe your messy spreadsheets. If your column headers are inconsistent or your data is poorly formatted, ChatGPT will get confused, and its suggestions for formulas will fail. In many ways, you spend less time writing formulas and more time explaining context to the AI.

Final Thoughts

Combining ChatGPT's superpower for generating formulas and code with Excel's classic flexibility is a fantastic way to streamline building your product management dashboard. It helps you get past the technical hurdles of syntax and go straight from planning to a functional, visual report in a fraction of the time.

Even so, this method doesn't solve the core drudgery of manual data exports and suffering through stale reports. We actually built Graphed to eliminate this exact pain. Instead of the copy-paste-refresh cycle, we connect directly to your data sources like Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Shopify. You can use simple, natural language to ask questions like "Create a dashboard showing our trial conversion and feature adoption rates from the last 90 days," and an interactive, real-time dashboard is built for you in seconds. It allows your entire team to get immediate answers from live data, which is a major leap from a static report anyone can build in Excel.