Dashboards and Widgets Creation Guide - MicroStrategy

Dashboards and Widgets Creation Guide Designing Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards 2
Choosing datasets for a dashboard
You can use existing reports and documents as datasets in a new dashboard.
This can save you time and help avoid unnecessary duplication in your
MicroStrategy metadata. You can also create new datasets for your
dashboard.
• A dataset should have enough data to be useful as a rich source of analysis
for many users, but it should not have extra data that is not needed on the
dashboard. For example, do not include product item information when
you only want to display product category information.
• As you gather or create datasets, focus on important indicators such as
performance stakes, trends, and variances.
• Users typically browse a large number of reports somewhat randomly,
looking for interesting trends. You can gather related reports to use on
your dashboard, so that all the data is available together in a single
context. Users can then locate the data more easily and analyze it more
efficiently.
• When choosing reports to incorporate into a single layer on a dashboard
(a dashboard page or panel), consider the ratio of graph to grid reports to
display. Common graph:grid ratios range from 4:1 to 1:3. The average
graph:grid ratio from a general sample of dashboards was approximately
2:1.
• Consider using a dashboard to replace 8-12 existing reports in your
MicroStrategy project. You will generally use 3-5 reports on each layer of
the dashboard; dashboards generally have from 1 to 3 layers (see
Layering information in a dashboard, page 42).
• Consider using a dashboard to replace three to four existing documents in
your MicroStrategy project. If you have three documents that contain
data from a related subject area, you can use each document as a single
layer (or panel) of your dashboard. Having all this related information in
one dashboard can provide a more productive analysis experience for
your users.
For example, you have three documents for your human resources
department. Each document is related to salaries and other benefits,
headcounts, or hiring. Create a dashboard with a panel stack sized to take
up the entire screen. Add two more panels so you have three panels in the
panel stack. Then re-create the first document on the first panel of the
dashboard, the second document on the second panel, and so on. Add a
selector of three tabs (buttons) at the top of the panel stack. Users can tab
between the layers of human resources data, depending on whether they
© 2012 MicroStrategy, Inc. Best practices for dashboarding 41