Knight's Microsoft® Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer: Leveraging Microsoft SQL Server® Integration, Analysis, and Reporting Services with Excel® and SharePoint®

Building a Dashboard

Reports are great at showing end users detailed information about your company, but sometimes

that detail is too much information. The users just need an overview of how the company is

doing. This is especially true of high-level executives. Most CEOs rarely need to see the data all

the way down to the transaction level or even the individual level. These high-level users need

to see the overall health of the company. This information is best displayed on a dashboard.

A dashboard shows the overview of the company in a way that makes it easy for users to get

answers to the questions that are important to them. Such questions might be “What store

is the best performing?” “Who are the top ten salespeople?” “What products are selling the

best?” “Which managers have the best-performing staff?” These questions could be answered

by reports, but reports may take several pages to supply the answers. A dashboard answers all

these questions on one page.

Generally, a dashboard contains charts, gauges, and small tables. All of these items are at a

high level and not very detailed. When a manager is viewing a dashboard and finds a number

that stands out as very good or very bad, he or she may want to drill down to the details of

that number. This drill-down capability can be added to a dashboard. The end user can simply

click the row in question to open a detailed report ba ...