I received some great responses from lots of fans. Thank you so much for all your great comments. I agree with most and my solution was very similar to Peter R.’s below. BUT, as always, Peter R. did a much better job with his Excel charts than my solution (so I won’t bore you with mine). Without further ado, here is the summary and details to everyone’s answers:
If you missed the challenge, stop now and go here to check it out 
Friday Challenge – The Boss Says “Can you create some graphs?”
Summary
Overall
1) All people thought that not enough testing was completed. We NEED more testing!
2) Since our audience are the company executives, averages are best to show in this case instead of details of each test.
Specific Questions
1) What would you conclude about the Version 3 fixes you implemented?
Speed is improving
2) What charts / graphs would you send the boss?
Conditional Formatted Averages
Bullet Charts
Line chart with Average Line and Error Bars
3) Now that you have charts, what do you conclude about your version 3 fixes?
Page 4 and 5 speeds are getting worse.
Page 1, 6, 10 and 12 are seeing the improvements.
Individual Answers
(Once again, thank you all for your responses. Great comments and examples!)
Jake
Jake stated: “Speed has increased to be 18% faster from version 1 to version 3. There is still room for improvement.”
Don
Don stated:
“First, as a board member, I would ask why only two tests on Versions 1 and 3 and six tests on Version 2?
This makes showing three separate charts, with different amounts, too confusing.
I have reported to a large number of the boards, and with this kind of data, I would stick with high level information, not details.
That is why I went with averages.
The bottom table tells the story.
Version 1 is marginally better than Version 2, and both
Versions 1 and 2 are much better than version 3.”
Here are some postings that will help you learn more about using conditional formatting in your Excel Dashboards:
The Tricks to Writing a Conditional Formatting Rule Formula
How-to Make a Non-Chart Excel Dashboard Chart (Heat Index)
How-to Make a Dynamic Hotel Ballroom Occupancy Chart
Friday Challenge Answers – Graph Increase at Time Interval
How-to Make a Dynamic Hotel Ballroom Occupancy Chart
Peter R.
Peter Stated: “Here is the short synopsis: They did not do enough testing. Versions 1 and 3 only had 2 test runs. Version 2 was probably tested enough, but the others were not. Overall, Version 3 appears a little better, however, I think there need to be more testing.
The chart allows you to select which Version you would like to highlight and shows how it compares to the other 2.”
Here are some postings that will help you learn more about using picklists in your Excel Dashboard charts and graphs:
How-to Create Dynamic Excel Dashboards Using Picklists
How-to Make an Excel PickList Chart for Multi Years by Month
Friday Challenge Submissions: Change Chart from Amount to Percent From a Picklist
How-to Create Dynamic Excel Dashboards Using Picklists
Change Chart from Amount to Percent using a Drop Down List
Creating Pick Lists in Excel for your Dynamic Dashboard
Piotr (Peter from Poland)
Peter created an awesome panel chart using a line chart, an average line and error bars to show an impressive amount of data. Thanks for your first submission Piotr. It looks great!!!
You can learn more about some of these techniques here:
Error Bars:
Double Helix DNA Strand Excel Chart
Another Reason to Avoid 3-D Charts in Excel
Average Lines:
How-to Create a Dynamic Banding on an Excel Line Chart
How-to Create Sales Quota Threshold Horizontal Lines in an Excel Column Chart
Friday Challenge – Analyzing Attendance Records with Six Sigma Charts
Panel Chart:
How-to Make a Wall Street Journal Horizontal Panel Chart in Excel
Free Excel Sample File Downloads
Dons-Page-speed-challenge.xlsx
Friday-Challenge-The-Boss-Says-Peter-from-Poland.xlsx
Thanks to everyone that sent me submissions! It is always a treat seeing how everyone tackles the same data as there is no right answer. We all can learn so much from each other. Thanks again!!!
Steve=True
