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Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Visio Stencil for Information Dashboard Design

I have been doing a lot of dashboard design lately.  When I do dashboard design I like to use Visio.  It is easy to use and you can output as PDF or an image file for easy sharing.  

One thing that always is a little bit of a pain is getting the right collection of chart samples together for designing a dashboard.  There are so many kinds of charts and ways to put together a display of data, that it can get tiresome to always be trying to find a sample.  So, a while back, I started collecting charts and created a Visio stencil to hold them.  This way I don't have to go hunting for chart samples anymore.

And now neither do you!

Here is the stencil that I created and have been using for dashboard design.  It comes with a selection of charts and text objects and annotations that have been useful to me.  It is not an exhaustive collection, but it has the more common elements. 

I'll be adding to it over time and will post updates as needed.  If you want a shortcut to designing dashboards or visual reports, give this a try.  This is most useful for designing Power Point style visual reports, not interactive reporting tools.