The Complete SharePoint Online Dashboard Guide

If you use SharePoint, there is a great chance that you normally use SharePoint lists to display data. With SharePoint online dashboard you can customize your site to display data in a great way that is more appealing to the site users. There are several technologies that can be used to create dashboards. The most popular services includes PowerPivot, performancePoint and powerView. Most of these technologies requires you to have enterprise-licenses for SQL or Power-BI functionality in office 365. One of the easiest ways of creating a SharePoint online dashboard is using Microsoft Excel.

But before you can start to create your site dashboard, it’s recommended to first create all the items that can be used to populate it. Even though Excel provides an easy way of incorporating a dashboard with a SharePoint site other technologies that use data analysis source will require you to create a scoreboard and combine it with a dashboard filter.

The Complete SharePoint Online Dashboard Guide

Step by Step for Selecting an Existing Data-Source

  1. In your workspace-browser pane, select “Data-Sources”
  2. Click on the “Refresh” icon to display all the latest items available in your site list.
  3. Under the “Data-sources” double click on the data-source that you would like to use.
  4. Locate the text editor tab and click on the “Test-Data-Source” to verify your connection settings. On your Browser you will see a “test-connection” dialog box that will display a “Connection Successful” text message.

If the success message does not appear, contact your site administrator for permissions.
Once you learn how to create or deploy an existing data-source on your site, use these steps to create a dashboard with simple chart from Excel.
Follow These Steps to Create or Deploy a Simple Excel Chart

  1. Open your Excel from your computer and choose a blank workbook as your template
  2. Click on the Data icon located at the topmost side of the ribbon
  3. In the next step create external group by clicking on the “from other Sources” button
  4. In the list option select “From-Odata-Data-Feed”
  5. In the textbox that is labeled “File or Link” put list-data.svc URL. You can do this by simply appending the URL to /_bin/-list-data.svc to it. For example if your SharePoint is https:mysite.com, then the URL should be something like this https:mysite.com/_bin/-listdata.svc
  6. After you have created the above URL click on the “next” button on the connection wizard
  7. If you are promoted to sign-in, use your password and username to access your lists
  8. Select a list that you would like to connect with from all of the available list options on the data-connection wizard
  9. Click on the next button
  10. Click on “finish” button to close your excel connection wizard
  11. On the import-data screen choose “pivotChart and click on the OK button

If you have followed and used these steps correctly, you should be able to see a small blank pivot-chart in your Excel work space. At the far right side of your excel worksheet, you should be able to locate a window that is labeled “pivotChart fields” that contain all the columns available in your SharePoint list. Creating a SharePoint online dashboard is very easy and does not require you to learn technical skills. If you follow the above steps, you will find it easy to create a SharePoint online dashboard.

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Marissa Hart is the Lead Author & Editor ShareMe. ShareMe is a blog focused on SharePoint Online. SharePoint Online delivers the powerful features of SharePoint without the associated overhead of managing the infrastructure.