Graphed LogoGraphed
Login

How to Create a Retail Dashboard in Excel with ChatGPT

Cody Schneider•

Creating a retail dashboard in Excel used to be a rite of passage, involving hours of VLOOKUPs, PivotTables, and tedious data cleaning. While the result is powerful, the process can be slow and frustrating. This guide shows you a faster, smarter way to build a comprehensive retail dashboard by using ChatGPT as your personal Excel assistant.

What Belongs on a Retail Dashboard?

Before you build anything, you need a clear plan. A retail dashboard is a visual control panel for your business, providing a one-page summary of your most critical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Staring at a blank spreadsheet is intimidating, so let's start by defining what you need to track. While the specifics can vary based on your business model (e.g., e-commerce vs. brick-and-mortar), most great retail dashboards include a mix of sales, inventory, and customer metrics.

Key Retail Metrics to Track

  • Sales Revenue: The total income from sales within a specific period. It's the most fundamental measure of your business's health.

  • Average Transaction Value (ATV): The average amount a customer spends in a single transaction. Calculated as Total Revenue / Number of Transactions.

  • Sales by Product Category: Identifies which categories are your bestsellers and which are lagging.

  • Inventory Turnover: Measures how many times inventory is sold or used during a period. A higher ratio indicates efficient inventory management.

  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The cost associated with convincing a customer to buy a product or service.

  • Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors (to your website or physical store) that make a purchase.

  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total revenue you can reasonably expect from a single customer account throughout the business relationship.

Planning and Structuring Your Dashboard with AI

A great dashboard answers specific questions. Are you trying to understand daily sales trends, monthly category performance, or quarterly customer behavior? Your goals will determine your layout. This is your first opportunity to use ChatGPT as a brainstorming partner.

Instead of guessing what charts to use, just ask. You'll get instant recommendations tailored to your needs, saving you the trial-and-error of building ineffective visuals.

Example ChatGPT Prompts for Planning:

  • "I'm building an Excel dashboard for my online Shopify store. What are the 7 most important KPIs I should track to understand sales performance and customer loyalty?"

  • "Give me a suggested layout for an Excel dashboard with three sections: Daily Sales Snapshot, Monthly Product Performance, and Customer Metrics."

  • "What are the best chart types in Excel for visualizing these metrics: sales trends over 3 months, top 5 product categories by revenue, and new vs. returning customers?"

Preparing Your Data for Analysis

Your dashboard is only as good as the data powering it. Most retail businesses pull data from multiple sources - your Point of Sale (POS) system, an e-commerce platform like Shopify, Google Analytics, or a CRM. This data often arrives in a messy CSV file that needs cleaning before it’s useful.

Common data prep steps include:

  • Removing Duplicates: Ensuring each transaction is counted only once.

  • Standardizing Formats: Making sure dates are all in the same format (e.g., MM/DD/YYYY) and categories are named consistently (e.g., "T-Shirts" vs. "tshirt").

  • Handling Blanks: Deciding what to do with missing values.

This is where ChatGPT can save you a tremendous amount of time by writing complex formulas for you. Just describe the problem you're trying to solve.

Example ChatGPT Prompts for Data Cleaning:

  • "I have an Excel sheet where a column 'Order Date' contains dates in various formats like '2023-11-05' and '5 Nov 2023'. Give me a formula to convert them all to a standard 'MM/DD/YYYY' format."

  • "Write an Excel formula to combine 'First Name' (cell A2) and 'Last Name' (cell B2) into a 'Full Name' column, ensuring proper capitalization for each name."

  • "I exported sales data and some transaction amounts have a '$' symbol and are saved as text. Give me a formula to remove the symbol and convert the cell to a number I can use in calculations."

Step-by-Step: Building Your Excel Dashboard

With your data clean and your plan in hand, it's time to build the dashboard. We'll use a structured approach that keeps your workbook organized and easy to update.

Step 1: Organize Your Excel Workbook

A disciplined file structure is crucial for a dashboard you can actually maintain. Create three tabs in your Excel file:

  • Data: This is where you will paste your raw, cleaned data from your source systems.

  • Calculations: This tab will house your PivotTables and summary calculations that power the charts. This keeps your dashboard clean and separates the logic from the presentation.

  • Dashboard: This is the final, customer-facing tab where all your charts and visuals will live.

Step 2: Summarize Your Data with PivotTables

PivotTables are Excel's most powerful feature for summarizing large datasets. They allow you to quickly aggregate and analyze information without writing a single formula. Move to your 'Calculations' tab to get started.

  1. Select any cell within your data on the 'Data' tab.

  2. Go to the Insert tab in the ribbon and click PivotTable.

  3. In the dialog box, choose to place the PivotTable in a new worksheet or an existing one (select a cell in your 'Calculations' tab).

  4. Drag and drop the relevant fields. For example, to see sales by product category, drag 'Product Category' to the Rows area and 'Sales Revenue' to the Values area.

Repeat this process to create several small, focused PivotTables for each metric you want to visualize (e.g., one for sales over time, one for top products, etc.).

Step 3: Create Charts and Visuals

Now, let's turn those summary tables into charts. On your 'Dashboard' tab, create space for your visuals.

  1. Click on one of your PivotTables in the 'Calculations' tab.

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

  3. Choose an appropriate chart type. A line chart is great for sales over time, while a bar chart works well for comparing categories.

  4. Once the chart is created, right-click it and select Move Chart. Move it to your 'Dashboard' tab.

Arrange your charts logically on the 'Dashboard' tab, giving it the look and feel of a real report. You can use ChatGPT for advice here too: "How should I design my dashboard layout? Where should I place KPI cards vs. detailed charts?"

Step 4: Write Complex Formulas with ChatGPT

While PivotTables handle most aggregations, you'll sometimes need specific calculations for KPIs like Average Transaction Value or growth percentages. Instead of researching functions like INDEX(MATCH()) or nested IF() statements, just ask ChatGPT to write them for you.

Be descriptive in your prompt. Mention the tab names, cell locations, or table names for best results.

Example ChatGPT Prompts for Formulas:

Paste the formulas provided by ChatGPT into your 'Calculations' tab. Then, on your 'Dashboard' tab, you can create a KPI card (using a Text Box or a simple cell reference) that displays the result of the formula.

Step 5: Make Your Dashboard Interactive with Slicers

A static dashboard is useful, but an interactive one is empowering. Slicers are user-friendly filters that allow you or your team to drill down into the data without having to touch the PivotTables.

  1. Click on any of your PivotCharts on the 'Dashboard' tab.

  2. Go to the PivotChart Analyze tab and click Insert Slicer.

  3. A dialog box will appear with a list of your data columns. Check the box for the field you want to filter by, like 'Product Category,' 'Year,' or 'Store Location.'

  4. A slicer will appear. To connect it to multiple charts, right-click the slicer, select Report Connections, and then check all the PivotTables you want this slicer to control.

Now, users can click a button on a slicer (e.g., "Jackets") and all connected charts and tables will dynamically update to show data only for that category.

Final Thoughts

Building a fully interactive retail dashboard in Excel simplifies tracking your store's performance and uncovers valuable insights without expensive software. By using ChatGPT as your co-pilot, you can overcome common hurdles like complex formulas and data preparation, ultimately saving hours and creating a more powerful reporting tool.

As helpful as this is, the biggest bottleneck remains manual data wrangling - downloading CSVs from Shopify, updating your Excel files, and ensuring everything is current is still a time-consuming weekly process. We built Graphed to solve this very problem. We connect directly to your marketing and sales platforms (like Shopify, Google Analytics, Salesforce, etc.) and let you build real-time, auto-updating dashboards simply by describing what you want to see in plain English. You get all the insights without any of the spreadsheet maintenance.