This article explains how you can use Spreadsheets and the table visualization to display milestones on your dashboard.
Note: You can use the Google Sheet used in this example.
Setting up your milestones
In a new Google Sheet or Excel file follow these steps:
Add columns to report progress against your milestones. In this example, we'll use Status, Milestone, Percentage Completion, All Tasks and Text. But you can use all sorts of ways to communicate progress.
Agree on a notation to display Status. We suggest: ✅ for "done", ⛔️ for "no progress / not started", and 🚌 for "in progress"
Tip: Google Sheets and Excel have a data validation feature that allows you to create a drop-down for easily setting and updating the Status. Also, if multiple people use the spreadsheet it helps encourage following a standard notation.Add your Milestones to the Google Sheet or Excel worksheet by filling every column you want to report.
Tip: To improve the space efficiency of the table, rather than dedicating a different column to each piece of information you can join them together by concatenating the text (using the ‘&’ symbol).The result would be:
✅ Milestone 1 [10 of 10]
Rather than
✅ Milestone 1 1010
There's all sorts of other tricks you can do with formulas, for example automatically changing the state depending on what’s left, changing the ordering based on status, or including an overall count of what’s left as a number widget.
Use our Spreadsheets data source to connect the Google Sheet or Excel worksheet to Geckoboard.
Select the table visualization and choose the columns you want to display on your dashboard.
