Showing Activity for Most Recent Days

I’m working on a dashboard for a company that sell tee shirts to high school sports programs.  They get their data from an online database which includes day and time of order as well as order amount. But, you could apply the same methodology to any data that is updated often, whether you are copying and pasting into Excel, importing from or linking to an Access database, or connecting to an ODBC data source. (Of course I didn’t use the company’s actual data; I used a cool trick to generate random dates and times for events for my sample data.)

At any given point, management of Acme SportsTees, Inc. would like to see the last 10 days of sales activity.  The trick to dashboards; and in my opinion, any process or task you are trying to automate; is removing from the process as much human involvement (thinking, typing, more thinking) as possible.  So, if you are able to connect directly to the data source, or at least reduce the actions required by the administrator to just copying and pasting, you will significantly reduce the opportunity for human error and a lot of headaches. Read more of this post