We learned how to create documents: these are useful for PDF publications, for example, or personalized invoices or any kind of printed communication. Actually, what customers want nowadays, is something more interactive: meet the dashboard.
Dashboards are in fact documents with all sections disabled but the Detail Header, and are intended for the Web or mobile usage instead of print. They add the ability to interact with, filter, or slice data using selectors and links to other documents; therefore, they can be considered as an "information cockpit" for managers and decision makers.
Still, they'll never substitute Excel in the heart of your users—just joking, I am myself an Excel user, and proud of it.
Designing dashboards is not trivial; I personally consider it the most challenging task in the whole BI project (if we exclude documentation, of course). More often than not, I spend more time creating useful and eye-catching panels, than in the whole schema objects creation. This is partly because data analysis is a moving target of ever changing specs and requirements, and to a certain extent we should get used to that. Let's not forget we get paid for coding.
We need to create another report with:
- Year
- Product Category
- Product Subcategory
- Country
- Sum SalesAmount from FactInternetSales
The position of objects inside the report grid is not relevant.
If you're not in the home page of the COOKBOOK project, click on the red star icon menu and select Home:
- Go to Create Document and from the list of templates choose Blank Dashboard.
- The dashboard template is a document with a single big gray panel that corresponds to the Detail Header, we will design objects inside this area.
- First, pick a report as dataset by clicking on the add a Dataset icon and selecting number 28 from My Reports folder. The list of objects is populated with attributes and the metric.
- Click on the small arrow icon next to the Insert menu and from the list that appears choose Grid. Now that the cursor is cross shaped, click-and-drag to create a small rectangular area of about 2 by 2 inches close to the left border.
- When the mouse button is released, you can see a grid with four placeholders. In the Dataset Objects pane, click on the Product Category attribute and drag it onto the placeholder that says Drop objects here to add rows. A yellow border highlights the left margin of the grid. Release the button and Product Category now displays as a row header.
- Now pick the metric and drag it onto the Drop Metrics here to add data placeholder. Now Sum SalesAmount from FactInternetSales occupies the column.
- Repeat steps 4 to 6 to create another grid object of about 2 by 2 inches on the right of the first grid. Use the Year attribute on rows and the metric.
- We now have two grids on our panel. Let's create another one below those two. You may need to use the scroll bars on your browser window to focus on the lower part of the gray area.
- Similarly, go to Insert | Grid and draw a rectangle 2 inches tall and about 4 inches wide, so that it spans the entire space below the other two grids.
- In this last grid, drop the Country attribute and the metric.
- Click on Interactive Mode to run the dashboard and look at the result.
- We have three grids with different attributes and different totals. However, they all read data from the same dataset. The numbers are aggregated according to the attributes present in each one. Colors and sizes of the grids can be improved and fine-tuned, I agree, but now we have a working panel with three perspectives of our data. Good job!
- Click on Save As… and name it
29 InternetSales Dashboard, then hit Run newly saved document.
We can add as many grids (and graphs) as the space on a dashboard allows. The metrics values in the document's grids are always calculated on the fly by the Intelligence Server, based on the elements on the rows and columns. Grids on a dashboard share the same behavior and features as grids in reports, so you can move and pivot the objects, add thresholds, change the format of the numbers and a lot more… you can even maximize or minimize a single grid with the small buttons on the title bar. Feel free to play a little with all the menu options and the format settings available.
Click on the magnifying glass in the top-left of a grid title bar, what happens?
From a grid in a document we can drill and analyze data including attributes that are not in the original dataset, such as Month or Product. This is a very powerful and potentially dangerous capability of the Web Interface. Remember, when you wander through the data, you can go back on your footsteps using the Web Interface buttons Back and Forward, see the following image:
It is better to use MicroStrategy Web buttons rather than the browser back and forth feature, because the Web Interface keeps track of the reports that you run and makes a rational use of the Intelligence Server cache, resulting in less burden for the network and a smoother experience for the user.