Continuing on from my previous blog post on Analytics Overview series, in this post, I am going to walk you through the process of building a comprehensive report and dashboard involving lots of charts involving data from multiple tables.
Some of the key features for dashboard designer are:
Interactive Ad-Hoc Dashboards – Building dashboards in Analytics Center is easy and intuitive, thanks to Analytics Center’s familiar Web-based feel. The Dashboard Designer Studio comes with preset layouts.
Advanced Visualization – Create interactive and animated visuals with drill downs and data hierarchy. Get a view of real-time information displayed in impactful charts and graphs, and present it in a more persuasive way.
Business KPIs – Efficiently setup the KPIs to view both non-time sensitive (trends, insights) and time sensitive (live business metrics) KPIs.
Promotes Re-usability – Include parts of existing reports to the dashboard.
Persuasive Presentation – Comes with presentation mode where dashboard tiles can be viewed in a slideshow with auto scroll.
Following video will walk you through the report design experience and see some of the advanced formatting features in action and finally use those report parts in a dashboard.
Good stuff here! A couple of things I noticed:
On the report you created of Employees -vs- Contractors, you used a boolean field for the X-Axis which made the report show two columns. However, those columns were labeled “true” and “false” which made it impossible to tell which column was employees and which column was contractors. Can you apply the “Alternate Text” function on a boolean field the same way that you were able to apply it on fields like Marital Status and Gender?
I also noticed on the reports of Employees by Job Title and Employees by Experience that when you brought over the field “BusinessEntityID” for the values field that it was left with a “SUM” function. Shouldn’t that have been changed to a “Count” function?
Loren,
Thanks for catching that. Yes, you could use alternate text to show proper labels like Contractor and Employees instead of true and false. Showing it as true or false was just a quick config I missed on that chart. If you look at the sample HR dashboard which I displayed at the beginning, it has the proper labels. That is a sample report available OOTB for customers to use as a reference.
Also, for the last 2 charts i.e. Employees by Job Title and Employees by Experience, your observation is correct. It will be count instead of sum. I missed changing that while wrapping up the demo. It is set properly in the sample report shown at the beginning. Thanks for noticing these ones. It will certainly help others following the video.