Dashboards are great tools to tell your data story. There are two main ways to tell your story: reports and dashboards.

A report is a static collection of data given to stakeholders periodically.

A dashboard, on the other hand, monitors live data. An information dashboard is a single-screen display of the most important information people need. It’s presented so that see what’s going on in an instant. Dashboards display a dense amount of information quickly in a small amount of space. Good dashboard design requires a knowledge of visual perception, which can be learned along with a technical tool such as Excel. Dashboards can be very sexy and dazzling, but a great dashboard communicates effectively.

Types of Dashboards

Often, businesses will tailor a dashboard for a specific purpose. The three most common categories are:

• Strategic: focuses on long-term goals and strategies at the highest level of metrics using KPIs
• Operational: short-term performance tracking and intermediate goals; focused on now
• Analytical: consists of the datasets and the mathematics used in these sets to identify trends

Metrics are measures of quantitative assessment commonly used for assessing, comparing, and tracking performance or production.

Strategic dashboards may show profitability over quarters and years, and number of new customers over quarters and years.

Operational dashboards are, perhaps, the most common type of dashboard. These dashboards contain information on a time scale of days, weeks, or months, they can provide performance insight almost in real-time. Data could includes sales in currency and units, number customer inquireies (tickets), profitability and so on.

Analytic dashboards contain a vast amount of data used by data analysts. These dashboards contain the details involved in the usage, analysis, and predictions made by data scientists. These are very technical category. Analytic dashboards are usually created and maintained by data science teams and rarely shared with upper management as they can be very difficult to understand. The data may include financial data, cash flow data, ROI data, analysis of asset usage and so on.