How to Do Reporting in Excel
Excel is much more than a simple grid of cells, it's one of the most accessible and powerful reporting tools available to any business. While flashy BI platforms get a lot of attention, millions of teams rely on Excel every day to track performance, analyze sales, and understand their data. The real challenge is moving beyond messy spreadsheets and creating clean, automated, and insightful reports that people actually want to use.
This guide will show you how to do just that. We'll walk through the process of taking raw data and turning it into a professional and dynamic report in Excel, complete with summaries, interactive charts, and a user-friendly dashboard.
Start with Clean, Structured Data
Before you build a single chart, your data needs to be in good shape. This is the most underrated step in the entire reporting process. If your data is messy, disorganized, or inconsistent, your final report will be meaningless. Garbage in, garbage out.
The goal is to have "tidy data." This is a simple concept that makes everything else in Excel work smoothly. It just means your data is organized like a simple database table:
Each column represents a variable. (e.g., Date, Sales Rep, Product, Region, Revenue).
Each row represents a single observation. (e.g., a single sale or a specific website visit).
There is one header row at the top. No merged cells or funky formatting in your headers.
Use Excel Tables for a Better Experience
One of the single best things you can do for your data is to format it as an official Excel Table. Don't be fooled by the name, this isn't just about adding some blue stripes to your spreadsheet. It supercharges your data management.
Here’s how to do it and why it’s so effective:
Click anywhere inside your clean data range.
Go to the 'Insert' tab and click 'Table', or just press the shortcut Ctrl + T (or Cmd + T on Mac).
Make sure the 'My table has headers' box is checked and click OK.
That's it! Your data is now in a dynamic Table. The benefits are immediate:
Automatic Formatting: The table automatically formats as you add new rows or columns, making your data easier to read.
Dynamic Range: When you add new rows of data to the bottom, the table automatically expands. This means any charts or PivotTables based on it will include the new data after a quick refresh, without you having to manually update the source range.
Easy Analysis: You can quickly add a 'Total Row' that can show sums, averages, counts, and more with a simple dropdown menu.
Summarize and Analyze with PivotTables
With clean data in an Excel Table, you're ready to start summarizing. PivotTables are Excel's engine for analysis. They allow you to take thousands of rows of data and create a neat summary table in seconds. Instead of writing complex formulas like SUMIFS or COUNTIFS, you can just drag and drop fields to answer your questions.
Creating Your First PivotTable: A Step-by-Step Guide
Let's imagine you have a simple sales report with columns for Order Date, Sales Reps, Region, Category, and Sales Amount. You want to find out the total sales for each region.
Click anywhere inside your Excel Table. You just need one cell selected.
Go to
Insert > PivotTable. A dialog box will appear. Because you're using a Table, Excel will automatically know your data range. It will default to creating the PivotTable in a new worksheet, which is usually the best option to keep things clean. Click OK.Build your summary. You'll see a blank PivotTable on the new sheet and a 'PivotTable Fields' panel on the right. This panel is your control center. It lists all the columns from your data source.
Drag and drop. To see total sales by region, simply drag the Region field into the 'Rows' area and the Sales Amount field to the 'Values' area.
Instantly, Excel generates a report showing each region and its corresponding sum of sales. You've just created a summary report in seconds that would have taken several minutes with formulas. You can now drag the Category field under the region to see a breakdown by product, or move Sales Reps to the 'Columns' area to see how each rep performed in each region.
Power Up Your Analysis with Slicers
Once you have a PivotTable, you can make it interactive with Slicers. Slicers are user-friendly buttons that filter your PivotTable data without having to use the clunky filter dropdowns.
With your PivotTable selected, go to the 'PivotTable Analyze' tab and click 'Insert Slicer.' Choose a field, like Category. Now you’ll have a small panel with buttons for each product category. Clicking one will instantly filter your PivotTable to show data for just that category.
Visualize Your Data with Charts and Graphs
Numbers in a table are good, but compelling visuals are better. A good report tells a story with charts and graphs, making it easier for your audience to see trends and comparisons. The best way to visualize your summaries is with PivotCharts. A PivotChart is simply a chart that is linked directly to a PivotTable.
Creating Dynamic PivotCharts
Building on our previous example, let's create a bar chart to visualize sales by region.
Click on your "Sales by Region" PivotTable.
Go to the 'PivotTable Analyze' tab and click 'PivotChart.'
Select the chart type you want, like a 'Clustered Column' or 'Bar' chart, and click OK.
You now have a chart that represents your PivotTable data. The best part? Any Slicers you connected to your PivotTable will also control the PivotChart. Now when you click a category slicer, both the PivotTable and your bar chart update automatically. This is the foundation of an interactive report.
Choosing the Right Chart for Your Data
Different questions require different charts. Here's a quick cheat sheet for picking the most effective visual:
Line Chart: Perfect for showing a trend over time. Use it for metrics like monthly revenue, weekly website traffic, or daily sales.
Column or Bar Chart: The best choice for comparing values across different categories. Use it for sales by region, performance by sales rep, or marketing spend by channel.
Pie Chart: Use this to show parts of a whole, like market share by competitor. A quick tip: pie charts become hard to read with more than four or five slices. A bar chart is often a better alternative.
Scatter Plot: A great choice for showing the relationship between two different numerical variables, such as ad spend vs. website conversions.
Bringing It All Together: Your First Excel Dashboard
A dashboard is a one-page summary that gives a high-level view of your most important metrics. It combines numbers and charts to give a snapshot of performance. In Excel, a dashboard is just a single worksheet where you organize your most important charts and figures.
Organizing Your Workbook for a Dashboard
A good dashboard starts with a well-organized workbook. Here's a best-practice structure:
A 'Data' Tab: One sheet dedicated to your raw data, formatted as an Excel Table. This is where you'll paste your updated data each week or month.
An 'Analysis' Tab: A second sheet where you build all your different PivotTables. You might have one PivotTable for sales over time, another for product categories, and so on. Keeping them on a separate sheet hides the messy backend from the clean report.
A 'Dashboard' Tab: A third, brand-new sheet where you'll present your final report.
Assembling the Dashboard
Here’s the step-by-step assembly process:
Create your PivotTables & PivotCharts. On your 'Analysis' tab, create all the individual summary tables and a corresponding PivotChart for each one.
Copy the charts to your dashboard. For each PivotChart, simply right-click it, select 'Copy,' and then paste it on your 'Dashboard' tab. Arrange the charts in a logical layout. Put the most important chart or metric in the top-left corner, as that's where people's eyes go first.
Add interactive slicers. On your dashboard page, select one of the charts. Go to 'PivotTable Analyze' > 'Insert Slicer'. Choose a field you want to filter everything by, like Year or Region.
Connect the slicer to all your charts. This is the key to making the whole dashboard interactive. Right-click on your Slicer and select 'Report Connections.' A dialog box will pop up, listing all the PivotTables in your workbook. Check the box for every PivotTable. Now, that one slicer controls every chart on your dashboard for a fully unified experience.
Keeping Your Report Fresh and Up-to-Date
The beauty of this dashboard setup is that updating it is incredibly easy. When you have new weekly or monthly data, you don't need to rebuild anything.
Go to your 'Data' tab.
Paste the new rows of data at the bottom of your Excel Table. The table will automatically expand to include it.
Go to the 'Data' tab in the ribbon and click 'Refresh All.'
That one click updates every PivotTable in your workbook, which in turn updates every chart on your dashboard. Your entire report is now current in a matter of seconds.
Final Thoughts
Creating powerful reports in Excel follows a simple path: prepare clean data in an Excel Table, summarize it with PivotTables, visualize with PivotCharts, and arrange them into an interactive dashboard. Mastering this workflow lets you transform overwhelming raw data into a dynamic tool that helps you and your team make better decisions.
Manually building and updating these reports in Excel, while effective, can still take hours each week. This is an all-too-common cycle of exporting CSVs, wrestling with formatting, and reminding yourself to hit "Refresh All." We designed Graphed to completely eliminate this process. We automate all the heavy lifting by connecting directly to your live data sources like Shopify, Google Analytics, and Salesforce. Instead of building PivotTables and charts, you can just ask questions in plain English, like "create a dashboard showing ROAS for my Facebook campaigns last month," and get a live, interactive dashboard instantly. It lets you skip straight to the insights, not the setup.