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The Pac-Man Dashboard

Over this weekend, in a random conversation, A friend asked if I can build a dashboard entirely of pie charts. Now that is a serious challenge! Pie-charts do not rank among my favorites, and to build a dashboard entirely of them is definitely not a fantasy of mine.

I looked into my collection of excel spreadsheets for a data table. I found one, but unfortunately do not remember where I've downloaded it from. It contains month-wise performance of 4 sales representatives, for 3 products, across 3 customer types, 4 regions and over 2 years.

After adding couple of columns to the original data and creating some much needed tables, and I was ready to set up my pies; - Oops, pie-charts. In about two hours, my dashboard is done. Can't help but feel all the pie charts give it a "Pac Man" look.

The top section of my "Pac Man" dashboard,



And the lower section of it.


Overall, it has been some time well spent and some valuable lessons learnt. This far and no further with pie charts!

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