Читать книгу Excel Dashboards & Reports For Dummies - Michael Alexander - Страница 14

A dashboard is a visual interface that provides at-a-glance views into key measures relevant to a particular objective or business process. Dashboards have three main attributes:

 Dashboards are typically graphical in nature, providing visualizations that help focus attention on key trends, comparisons, and exceptions.

 Dashboards often display only data that are relevant to the goal of the dashboard.

 Because dashboards are designed with a specific purpose or goal, they inherently contain predefined conclusions that relieve the end user from performing his own analysis.

Figure 1-2 illustrates a dashboard that uses the same data shown in Figure 1-1. This dashboard displays key information about the national park overnight-visitor stats. As you can see, this presentation has all the main attributes that define a dashboard. First, it’s a visual display that allows you to quickly recognize the overall trending of the overnight-visitor stats. Second, you can see that not all the detailed data is shown here — you see only the key pieces of information relevant to support the goal of this dashboard, which in this case would be to get some insights on which parks would need some additional resources to increase visitor rates. Finally, by virtue of its objective, this dashboard effectively presents you with analysis and conclusions about the trending of overnight visitors.

FIGURE 1-2: Dashboards provide at-a-glance views into key measures relevant to a particular objective or business process.