Building a Dashboard

A dashboard collects saved questions into one screen.

Where to find it

Architect Panel → Dashboards:

• BI Dashboards — create and edit dashboards
• Custom Dashboard Blocks — blocks beyond the standard chart types
• Dashboard Styles — how they look
• Shared Dashboard Layout — a layout used across a team

Decide what it is for

The best dashboards answer one question: is anything wrong today. Overdue obligations, unallocated cases, stock below minimum, an unprocessed feed inbox, aged debt. Things somebody will act on.

Analysis is a different job and belongs in a report somebody opens deliberately. Mixing the two produces a screen that is neither.

Keep it short

A dashboard of twenty charts is one nobody reads, and its real cost is that the two figures that mattered were on it and were ignored. If everything is on the dashboard, nothing is.

Choose the right chart

Trends over time as a line, comparisons between categories as a bar, and a single important number as a number. A pie chart with eleven segments communicates less than the list it was made from.

Shared layouts

Where a team should all see the same thing, use a shared layout rather than each person building their own. It means one change updates everyone, and it stops the situation where two people in a meeting are looking at differently-configured versions of the same dashboard.

Review what is actually used

Dashboards accumulate. Once or twice a year, find out which are still opened and retire the rest — a stale dashboard showing a metric nobody tracks any more is worse than none, because somebody will eventually believe it.