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How to Create an Employee Dashboard in Google Sheets with ChatGPT

Cody Schneider•

Manually building an employee dashboard in Google Sheets often involves a frustrating process of wrangling formulas and fighting with chart settings. Instead of spending hours looking up VLOOKUPs and pivot table tutorials, you can use ChatGPT to do the heavy lifting for you. This article will walk you through, step-by-step, how to use ChatGPT to generate the formulas, structure the data, and build a powerful employee dashboard right in Google Sheets.

Why Google Sheets is a Great Choice for Employee Dashboards

Before jumping into the how-to, it’s worth noting why Google Sheets is such a popular choice for internal dashboards. First, it’s free and accessible to anyone with a Google account. Its familiar, spreadsheet-based interface means there’s virtually no learning curve for your team to view and understand the data. Most importantly, its cloud-based nature makes collaboration and sharing completely seamless.

The primary challenge, however, has always been the manual effort required to transform raw data into a polished, insightful dashboard. This is where combining Sheets with an AI assistant like ChatGPT changes the game entirely.

Step 1: Planning Your Dashboard - Garbage In, Garbage Out

The most advanced AI in the world can't create a useful dashboard from poorly planned and messy data. Taking a few minutes to define your goals and structure your information is the most important step in this entire process.

Define Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

What do you actually want to measure? An "employee dashboard" can mean many things. Are you focused on performance, satisfaction, or operational metrics like attendance? Don't try to track everything. Instead, pick a handful of KPIs that align with your company’s goals. Here are a few common examples to get you started:

  • Headcount: Total number of active employees, often broken down by department or team.

  • Employee Turnover Rate: The percentage of employees who leave the company over a specific period.

  • Absenteeism Rate: The percentage of missed workdays due to absence.

  • Average Employee Tenure: The average length of time an employee has been with the company.

  • Employee Satisfaction (eNPS): Scores from internal surveys measuring an employee's willingness to recommend their company as a place to work.

  • Performance Ratings: Average scores from performance reviews.

  • Training Hours per Employee: The total time spent on professional development.

Structure Your Raw Data

Your dashboard will be a high-level summary, but it needs to pull its information from a source of clean, raw data. Create a separate tab in your Google Sheet called "Raw Data" or "Employee Roster." The key here is to keep it organized and machine-readable.

Follow a simple rule: one row per employee. Each column should represent a specific attribute. Here’s a good example structure:

Example "Raw Data" Tab:

Employee_ID

Full_Name

Department

Status

Hire_Date

Termination_Date

Performance_Rating_(1-5)

eNPS_Score_(1-10)

101

Jane Doe

Marketing

Active

2022-03-15

4.5

9

102

John Smith

Sales

Terminated

2021-07-20

2024-04-10

3.8

7

103

Priya Patel

Engineering

Active

2023-11-01

5.0

10

A few crucial tips for your data sheet:

  • Be Consistent: Use the same text for the same department (e.g., "Marketing," not "marketing" or "Marketing Dept").

  • Use Proper Date Formats: Ensure all your date columns are formatted as dates (Format -> Number -> Date).

  • No Merged Cells: Merged cells are terrible for formulas and data processing. Avoid them at all costs in your raw data tab.

Step 2: Leveraging ChatGPT to Build the Dashboard Components

Now for the fun part. With your raw data properly structured, you can start using ChatGPT as your personal formula expert. Forget trial-and-error - just describe what you need in plain English.

Generating Formulas with ChatGPT

Let's say you want to calculate the total number of active employees. Head over to ChatGPT and give it a clear, specific prompt. The more detail you provide, the better the formula will be.

Example Prompt #1: Total Active Employees

"I have a Google Sheet with a tab named 'Raw Data'. In this sheet, Column D is titled 'Status' and contains either 'Active' or 'Terminated'. I need a Google Sheets formula that counts the total number of 'Active' employees."

ChatGPT will likely give you the following formula instantly:

=COUNTIF('Raw Data'!D:D, "Active")

Now you can just copy this formula and paste it into a cell on your main "Dashboard" tab.

Let's try a more complex calculation, like the average performance rating for a specific department.

Example Prompt #2: Average Rating by Department

"Using the same 'Raw Data' sheet, I want to calculate the average performance rating for the 'Sales' department. The 'Department' is in Column C, and the 'Performance_Rating_(1-5)' is in Column G. Give me a Google Sheets formula for this."

You'll get a formula like this one:

=AVERAGEIF('Raw Data'!C:C, "Sales", 'Raw Data'!G:G)

With just two simple prompts, you've calculated powerful KPIs without typing a single complex formula yourself. This process saves a monumental amount of time, especially for users who aren't spreadsheet wizards.

Step 3: Assembling the Visual Dashboard

A good dashboard separates its visual elements from its raw data. You should have at least two tabs: "Raw Data" and "Dashboard." The "Dashboard" tab is where you'll display your KPIs and charts for a clean, at-a-glance view.

Creating Your Dashboard Tab and KPI Cards

On your new "Dashboard" tab, start by creating summary "cards" for your most important KPIs. This is as simple as dedicating a few cells to display your numbers clearly. See the sample layout below:

The text describes the metric, and the cell beside it contains the formula you generated with ChatGPT. By formatting the number cells with a large font and a solid background color, you can create a simple yet highly effective "card" design.

Populating Data for Charts

Charts often need a small summary table to pull from. For example, if you want a bar chart showing the headcount per department, you first need a table that lists each department and its corresponding employee count.

Don't create this table manually! ChatGPT can generate the formulas for this too.

Example Prompt #3: Creating a Summary Table for a Chart

"From my 'Raw Data' sheet, I need to create a summary table on my 'Dashboard' sheet. First, give me a formula to pull a list of all unique departments from Column C of the 'Raw Data' sheet. Then, give me a formula to count the number of active employees for each of those departments."

ChatGPT will guide you:

  1. "To get a list of unique departments, place this formula in cell A2 of your Dashboard sheet:"

    =UNIQUE('Raw Data'!C2:C)

  2. "Then, in cell B2, use this formula and drag it down next to your list of departments:"

    =COUNTIFS('Raw Data'!C:C, A2, 'Raw Data'!D:D, "=Active")

The result is a perfectly formatted summary table, ready for visualization, built entirely by describing what you wanted in plain English.

Step 4: Creating Charts and Visualizations

With your summary tables ready, adding charts is simple. Highlight the data you want to visualize (e.g., the department names and their corresponding headcounts), then click "Insert" -> "Chart" in the Google Sheets menu.

Google Sheets will automatically suggest a chart type, but you should choose the one that best tells the story of your data.

Common Chart Types for Employee Dashboards:

  • Bar Chart: Perfect for comparisons, like headcount by department or average performance rating by team.

  • Line Chart: Ideal for showing trends over time, such as monthly turnover rate or quarterly eNPS scores.

  • Scorecard Chart: A great way to highlight a single, critical number, like Total Headcount or the company-wide Absenteeism Rate.

  • Pie Chart: Use sparingly, but it can be effective for showing the composition of your workforce, like the percentage of employees in each department.

If you're unsure which chart to use, you can even ask ChatGPT for advice.

Example Prompt #4: Asking for Visualization Recommendations

"I have data showing the employee turnover rate for each month of the past year. What is the best type of chart to visualize this trend in Google Sheets?"

ChatGPT will likely recommend a line chart and even suggest how to best set up your columns and rows for it. Before you know it, you can assemble a complete dashboard page.

Final Thoughts

By blending the familiar interface of Google Sheets with the powerful assistance of ChatGPT, you can build a functional and insightful employee dashboard in a fraction of the time. This approach lets you focus on what the data means, not on the tedious mechanics of pulling it together, making data-driven decision-making accessible to everyone on your team.

While this method saves incredible amounts of time, the data in your Google Sheet can quickly become outdated. That's why we created Graphed. Instead of wrestling with formulas and manual updates, you simply connect your data sources and describe what you want to see - like, "Create a dashboard showing our sales pipeline from Salesforce filtered by sales rep this quarter." We instantly build a live, interactive dashboard that updates automatically, helping your team get from question to insight in seconds.