Visualize Your Data

A Dashboard is a data presentation tool that you create in Visual Composer to dynamically filter a data set and visualize the output on tables, charts, and gauges. By visualizing your data with a Dashboard, you can rapidly discover meaningful trends and associations that yield actionable business intelligence.

Visual Composer a web-based tool for creating both Data Worksheets and Dashboards. The workflow for Visual Composer is the following:

  1. Create a Data Worksheet to assemble and process your data. The Data Worksheet is the data layer. See Create a Data Worksheet.

  2. Create a Dashboard to display your data using Charts, Tables, and other visual elements. The Dashboard is the presentation layer. See Create a New Dashboard.

If you are using a data model and do not need extensive data manipulation, you do not need to create a Data Worksheet. You can build your Dashboard directly from the data model.

Overview

This module contains the following key sections, and is relevant to designers and end-users:

  • Create a New Dashboard: Create a new Dashboard using Visual Composer. The Dashboard can draw data from a Data Worksheet or a data model.

  • Edit a Dashboard: Edit an existing Dashboard in Visual Composer.

  • Add Components: Add components such as Filters, Form components, Charts, Tables, and KPIs to build a complete Dashboard.

  • Arrange Components: Position components in a Dashboard, economize real estate, and configure a Dashboard to display well on different devices.

  • Create a Chart: Add a Chart to your Dashboard, set the Chart type, adjust axis representation, add dimensions and measures, configure target lines and curve fits, add tooltips and other informative displays, and enable end-user Chart control.

  • Create a Table: Add a Table to your Dashboard, set column properties, and styles.

  • Create a Crosstab: Add a Crosstab to your Dashboard, which groups dimensions and aggregates measures in tabular form. Set aggregation methods, custom groups, and grand totals.

  • Create a Freehand Table: Add a Freehand Table to a Dashboard, which allows you to script individual Table cells, access data from other components, and control the way rows and columns expand. This is recommended only for advanced users.

  • Create a Table Style: Define a custom reusable Table style, which incorporates borders, colors, fonts in a single asset.

  • Compare Data by Date: For Charts and Crosstabs containing Date-type dimensions, perform a variety of date comparisons such as month-over-month, year-to-date, and isolated date range comparisons.

  • Add a KPI: Add textual and graphical key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are effective at communicating summary information at a glance.

  • Drill Down into Data: Dive deeper into your data with a variety of techniques such as zoom, hyperlink, flyover, brush, exclude, hierarchy, and show details.

  • Filter a Dashboard: Add filters so that users can limit the data displayed on the Dashboard in dynamic and interesting ways. Filters can be static or dynamic and can filter at the detail or aggregate level.

  • Sort Data: Sort data in Charts or Tables based on alphanumeric order or based on aggregate values.

  • Dynamically Set Properties: Enhance a Dashboard with greater interactivity by using Form components and scripting to modify properties in response to user input or other parameters and conditions.

  • Write Back to Storage: Configure the Dashboard to save modified data together with the Data Worksheet. This allows you to persist changes across sessions.

  • Improve Performance: Create a materialized view to facilitate rapid dashboard interactions. Materialized view is an advanced caching mechanism for Dashboards that retrieve large datasets.

  • Enhance a Visualization: Add formats, colors, and other visual aids to a Dashboard to make it look professional and user-friendly.