Advice on building a dashboard

[ClareLou]

Hey Excelers,

With the help of this forum, I now have a very helpful Holiday/Leave tracker. For the next step, I want to build a dashboard for this spreadsheet that shows me trends (such as who's taken the most/least sick leave, holiday, etc) and leave forecasts for the upcoming months that could show the entire company and also could be filtered to show specific departments. This dashboard would also be used by department managers when planning their staff for the upcoming months, which is where filtering the data by department will come in handy.

Can you please give me advice on where I should start with building the dashboard. This is the first time for me and I am conscious that I haven't always been approaching my data handling in the best way, so would love to get some good advice on where to start. I am also vaguely aware that I may need to use pivot tables, but I've never used these before either.

I have attached a sample version of the spreadsheet and hope this helps but I am happy to answer any follow up questions.

Thanks in advance!

[ClareLou]

Anyone?