A manager does not want to scroll through 400 rows. She wants answers: how many households did the survey reach in each district, which product sold most this month, how many members still owe dues. NGO monitoring and evaluation roles in Ghana regularly ask for dashboards in Excel or Power BI, and operations roles ask for the same thing in other tools. Turning clean data into clear answers is one of the most valued no code skills.
Start from the question
Before building anything, write down the questions the report must answer. "Show me everything" is not a question. "How many women attended training in each community this quarter?" is. Each question usually becomes one number, one small table or one chart.
Summary formulas
Simple functions answer many questions without anything fancy:
- COUNTIF counts rows that meet a condition, such as registrations from Tolon.
- SUMIF adds amounts that meet a condition, such as sales of rice.
- AVERAGE, MIN and MAX describe a column of numbers.
Put these on your summary tab, pointing at the data tab, so they update as new rows arrive.
Pivot tables
A pivot table summarises a table by groups without any formulas. You choose which column becomes the rows (say, district), what to calculate (say, count of households) and optionally a column for comparison (say, month). Google Sheets, Excel and LibreOffice all have them. Building one is easiest on a computer, but the finished result can be read on any screen.