Dashboards use in Power BI
A visual schema to facilitate decision making
As we saw in a previous post, Microsoft Power BI is a data analysis service that simplifies understanding and obtaining useful results for our business thanks to its attractive and functional interactive visualizations. Thus, at a glance we will be able to easily interpret even the most complex results.
At this point, dashboards, also known as panels, help us to visualize and better understand how our business works. We can analyze data, detect threats and define the actions that can lead us to solve them, thus facilitating and optimizing decision making.
Understanding a dashboard
It could be said that a dashboard is, quite simply, a summary that brings together the most relevant data for our business, presenting them in a visual, simple and attractive way, in order to facilitate their subsequent interpretation. A BI (Business Intelligence) tool with which to carry out an adequate monitoring of the general state of the company, a specific department or a specific campaign or process.
To do this, it is essential to previously define our key performance indicators (KPIs), those metrics and data that are most relevant to our interests. Dashboard visualizations can arise from a set of data, as well as from a report or several reports, and can combine local and online data, thus providing a consolidated representation, regardless of where the data resides.
Five advantages of working with dashboards
A dashboard is not just an attractive static image. It is an interactive tool that is updated as data changes and provides a number of very interesting advantages.
- Easy to interpret
The main functionality of the dashboard is none other than to represent the main metrics relevant to our business in a simple, clear and visual way. It is not necessary to be an expert in the subject in question to understand what it shows us and if at any time we want to go deeper into a particular point we can always use another more specific tool.
- Information always accessible
By being able to combine local and online data, a dashboard that is automatically synchronized in the cloud allows different users of the same team to share the same information, consulting, analyzing and interpreting the data in real time, at any time, from anywhere.
- Fast response time
Its ability to display and share the most relevant information to study the performance of our business allows us to react almost immediately to possible opportunities or threats, as well as to evaluate the results of the changes applied and the decisions taken.
- Global vision
Our dashboard or control panel can show us at once and at the moment data extracted from different sources, for example metrics from social networks, information from our CRM, business results classified by areas or web analytics solutions. This will make it much easier to make a comparison and observe its evolution, getting a global vision without having to access them separately.
- Resource optimization
A control panel is a huge saving of resources and time by concentrating through a single tool scattered data from different sources and reports with which it prepares its graphs and visualizations. Once we have defined our KPIs, we will only have to configure once the way to present them and they will be generated automatically.
Using dashboards in Power BI
By generating our dashboard with Microsoft Power BI we will be able to have a visual story about our business on a single page, or canvas. By limiting it to a single page, a well-designed dashboard will include only the main elements, and the information can be expanded in the related reports of the document to know the details.
While a report is a good starting point for creating a dashboard, there are other ways in Power BI, such as from data, a data set, a set of reports, by duplicating an existing dashboard, or even from scratch.
But, beyond the step-by-step procedure to generate a dashboard, there are a number of common key factors that we must take into account to achieve a truly useful and relevant result, a functional and attractive dashboard for future decision making.
General recommendations for creating a dashboard
It may seem obvious but the ultimate intention of a dashboard is not only to show or analyze data but to build and tell a story with it that is relevant to our business. It is always necessary to show a context and build a story that evolves from the data to the conclusions we want to draw.
In addition, it is essential to consider who is going to use the dashboard. Knowing which audience we are targeting will help us decide which will be the key metrics that will help us make the different decisions and what information our audience will need to achieve the best results.
Dashboards are designed to show important information at a glance, so it is recommended to include all icons on one screen. However, even though the panel is based on reports and underlying data sets, and those elements may contain numerous details, users can always drill down into the reports from the dashboard so it is not advisable to include these details on our page, unless it is these details that need to be monitored.
It is also very important to keep in mind where our dashboard will be displayed and shared. If it is going to be projected on a large screen we will be able to include more content than if it is going to be consulted on a mobile device, where we will include fewer icons. In any case, it is always advisable to show our dashboard in full screen mode when presenting it to avoid distractions.
Properly organizing the information we are going to share will help a comfortable and simple interpretation. Generally in the western world, users read from top to bottom and from left to right. Bearing this in mind, it is advisable to place the highest level of data in the upper left level and expand the details as necessary in the reading direction.
It is also very important to know how to prioritize the information to achieve a more attractive visualization. To do this we can play with the size, location and colors. If the text and graphics are the same size, it will be more difficult to interpret which data is a priority and focus on what is really important.
As we can see, in general, all the recommendations are aimed at highlighting the most important information, keeping the rest of the piece clean and uncluttered. When it comes to dashboards and visual representation of data, less is always more.