How can you create a dashboard that provides a comprehensive view of your data?

For example, say we're to create a dashboard that would help the executives understand a company's overall sales performance, as well as the performance of individual products and regions. The first step for this would be to understand the audience and outline the goals. Identify what the most important metrics for the business are (total sales, sales by product, sales by region, sales growth over time, etc.), and what data would be needed to make informed decisions. Utilize the right tools and charts that best communicate the data and insights to the audience. Organize and group related metrics together where necessary. Implementation of slicers and filters to aid interactions between data for in-depth detail should be greatly considered.

Goal and audience are important. Make sure you understand them before starting anything (applies to literally everything)....

To create a comprehensive data dashboard as a data analyst, start by identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) and goals relevant to your business objectives. Gather and clean the necessary data, employing tools like SQL for data manipulation and cleaning. Choose a suitable dashboarding tool such as Tableau, Power BI and design a user-friendly interface with visually appealing charts and graphs. Ensure that the dashboard provides a holistic view of the data by incorporating various perspectives, such as trends, comparisons, and distributions.

Creating a comprehensive data dashboard involves defining objectives, selecting relevant data sources, and choosing a suitable dashboard tool like Tableau or Power BI. Clean and preprocess data, use visualizations like charts and graphs, and incorporate interactivity for dynamic exploration. Organize the layout logically, include key metrics, and ensure regular updates for relevancy. User testing is crucial for feedback and continuous improvement. Keep the dashboard simple, focused, and aligned with specific goals, adapting it to changing business needs over time.

Speak to the data owner and select the appropriate data for your story. Sometimes people begin working with data that doesn't align with their story, and they end up having to redo it. This situation occurs to everyone. Simply strive to enhance it.

KPIs are Key Performance Indicators, i.e. metrics that help you quantify the success or failure of your tasks. There are tons of KPIs out there! The most complex part of implementing a dashboard consists of researching and selecting the most suitable KPIs for your task. You need to do some homework before starting the implementation of the dashboard.

There are visualization types that fit some tasks. Line plots and area charts vs pie charts and bar charts; parallel coordinates vs simple histograms. There are also some visualization types that fit some end users. For example, purists despise pie charts because small differences in value are hard to see. However, I noticed that higher management, like C*O, does appreciate a pie chart or two. So choose yiur visualization tevhnique wisely, depending on task, data, and end users.

Visualization is subjective. The chart that I like may not be suitable for you. Therefore, it's important to understand your stakeholders and their chart requirements, and build upon that.

Too many filters and annotations won't provide much clarity. Put all the columns inside the filter, and use the main column on the dashboard screen.

No matter how well we think we have scoped out the requirements for a dashboard, there will always be data points we missed, or are not presenting correctly. This is why we must allow end users to provide feedback on the dashboard so that we can capture these "misses." We can then iterate through these new discoveries, feedback, and bugs, resulting in a continually evolving dashboard. That's the beauty of a well-defined feedback mechanism. It's a beautiful way to iterate to perfection for a dashboard.

Test, test, and test again. It's vital. Make sure to always test the dashboard thoroughly and fine-tune the details. You don't want someone looking at it for the first time to say, "You could have seen this earlier and removed it."