From: Elena Brooks, Operations Manager, Northwind Help Desk, a fictional support business.
Elena needs a morning review of backlog and throughput. Teams have different workloads, so show an open-ticket share alongside resolution time. An open ticket has no Closed Date; it must not become a zero-day resolution.
Data: one row per ticket, with Team, Created Date, Closed Date, Product Area and Satisfaction. Missing Satisfaction means no response, not a zero score.
Deliverable: Support Operations, with Open Share by Team, Resolution by Team and Ticket Trend. Let a team selection filter the other views. State how missing close dates affect the resolution average.
Build the workbook from the stakeholder's brief. Each step continues from your previous answer, so keep the sheets and calculations you have already made. The finished dashboard must let someone investigate a question without opening the authoring controls.
Decide the grain of each measure before you place it. One customer can place several orders, and an order can contain several lines. Counting a name or an order ID therefore means something different from counting distinct values. A polished dashboard with the wrong denominator still gives the wrong answer.
Use the sheet names in the tasks. They become the dashboard's titles and make its actions easier to check.