Built my first Excel-only dashboard (no Power BI/Tableau) and placed 1st runner-up in a skill sprint
Wanted to share since I learned a lot doing this.
For a competition called the DSSD Skill Sprint, I built a dashboard analyzing NVIDIA's global sales — using synthetic/AI-generated data since real data obviously isn't public. The twist: I did it entirely in Excel, no Power BI, no Tableau, just pivot tables, slicers, and native charts.
Honestly didn't expect to place — ended up 1st runner-up out of the group, which was a nice surprise for my first real dashboard project.
Biggest challenges I ran into:
Handling nulls/blanks scattered across the dataset
Inconsistent date formatting that broke my pivot tables initially
Negative stock values that were throwing off my totals until I filtered/cleaned them
Nothing groundbreaking technically, but it proved to myself that Excel alone can tell a solid data story if you're deliberate about cleaning first.
Happy to share screenshots or specifics on the formulas/pivot setup if anyone's curious