Dashboard Creator – Part III

In previous posts, I introduced on the Dashboard Creator tool that I made in Excel.

In short, the Dashboard Creator takes list data that appears on Excel sheets, and packages it into a dashboard. I proposed you can get that data into the list by using a TFS-Bound List.

I also wanted to share, that I have personally used Excel’s Data Connection mechanism to get additional data, not stored in TFS, onto my dashboard.

If you have used Excel’s Data Connections before, then this will all seem very simple to you. If you haven’t, then this blog post may not make much sense. In short, it allows Excel to run queries on external databases and populate rows in a sheet with the query results.

For example, we have an internal tool that we use to manage our automated test runs. It stores its data in a SQL database. I was able to connect to the SQL Server via Excel’s native connection/query mechanism, to the Test Run database, and pull in information about test runs.

Here is an actual instance dashboard (with team member’s names removed) I created while manage work on both Orcas and Rosario releases. Orcas NAR/FAR and Rosario NAR/FAR represents the test run analysis. (NAR=Nightly automated run. FAR=Full automated run)

The data pulled into this dashboard was populated from a Sheet called “TestResults”, which was populated using Excel’s Data Connections feature.

I should also note that the “Refresh” button not only refreshes all TFS-Bound lists, but also refreshes all Data Connections-bound lists as well. So pressing Refresh updates all the information before rebuilding the dashboard.

If you are interested in more information on this dashboard creater, see previous posts. If you want to download the dashboard creator, you can find it attached to this post.