Stepping up to dashboards
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...
