Dashboarding essentials

Dashboard or visualization applications are a pictorial representation of data.

• They provide executives and analysts with insight into an organization's key performance indicators (KPIs) to make business decisions. They give users a snapshot of the KPIs and the ability to see the details of the data.
• Dashboards involve creating various visualization objects and placing them on screen in a way that provides users with ease of both understanding and accessing the information.
• As dashboard helps in understanding data, care should be given to engage users with the data. Overuse of colors should be avoided. Attempts should be made to avoid any object that does not represent data.
• Edward Tufte, the author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphics Press USA, provides principles for visualizing large quantities of data. His book states that data graphics should draw the viewer's attention to the sense and substance of data, not to something else...