Background
Early January, 2026, we had concluded first stage of employee annual performance appraisal at departmental level. We now awaited feedback from directorate who are in charge of moderation of performance appraisal feedback scores awarded to each employee by the departmental head. The second stage (moderation) considers the overall performance of the organization, the moderation committee ‘opinion’ about the department among other ‘things.’ In late February, 2026, we received a communication rejecting appraisal results of all employees in the department plus departmental head’s recommendations. One comment stood out in the communication; “the department has not presented any dashboard to demonstrate individual employee’s productivity, improvements on performance measures and so on to justify promotions or any rewards’. I then asked myself two questions. If the agreed performance measures are all captured in an online Human Resource Management System application (HRMS) depending on each employee’s Job Description (JD) and the HRMS has computed the employee’ performance scores, which other ‘things’ are being reviewed at moderation stage? Why is the data captured in the application not being used to create dashboards to help answer questions raised at moderation stage? Based on my years of experience, I had always felt that the performance measures as captured in HRMS were general and would not be sufficient to create any dashboards. Using excel application, this article will attempt to create a simple dashboard which could have been used to monitor one Key Performance Indicator (KPI) on monthly basis and may have been used to measure performance. The critical indicator that has direct impact on customer service is Turn Around Time (TAT).
This article is written in fulfilment of an assignment and as such, it is not to be relied on entirely for academic writing.
Introduction
Microsoft Excel (Excel) was introduced in the 1980s and the initial release included features which in today’s standard are considered basic. The features included cell formatting, simple formulas, and charting capabilities. The Excel ease of use and capabilities made it a favourite and popular appli
cation among its users. This background became the foundation for what would become the world’s dorminant spreadsheet application used in almost every industry.
Fast forward, the latest iteration of Excel includes capabilities such as puling live information such as scientific figures, market trends and historical statistics from trusted online sources into a worksheet. It has also introduced a wide range of formulas to help in data manipulations as well as AI-based data cleaning feature to address inconsistent text, number formats, and extra spaces thereby reducing time spent on manual data cleaning. These enhancements position Excel as more than just as a spreadsheet tool since the intelligent data platform capabilities enable automation of analysis, connecting to live external data sources and so on hence transforming how professionals work with data.
Excel Formulas & Features
Excel has well over 500 formulas which are broadly categorized as financial, statistical, logical, text, lookup, engineering, and date/time. Due to ever increasing number of new features being released and added to the software, it has become difficult to keep track of all the updates.
Below monitoring feature was developed using hypothetical statistical data for three months period. A simple ‘nested IF’ formular was used to establish number of credit files reviewed within set TAT and those with delayed TAT. A simple pivot table was extracted from the data to summarized the findings and simple line graph plotted to visualize trend of TAT compliance. Another excel feature; ‘slicer’ was added to make it easier for reviewer to interact with the line graph.
Conclusion
Excel has becoming a tool that can be used to perform more functions and as such, any task which generates, collects or processes data should aim at creating a visual summary inform of a dashboard that communicates or monitors if everything is on track to help achieve a bigger goal.
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