Creating a dashboards for reporting

- [Instructor] Dashboards can provide valuable insight into different data scenarios. And the scenarios are created by us, the users. Dashboards can be built where they show key performance indicators. And for us, it's the sales performance in the countries that we're interested in. Here, the size of the dot represents the amount of sales in the country. So if I click on North America, I will see on the left-hand side all the products. And because these headings are sortable, I can interact and sort the total after discount, bringing the highest products ordered to the top. But how does that look in different countries? So for example, if I choose Sweden, will it also be wines? As soon as I click Sweden, I see that the bratwurst takes the lead. I click off my map and brings all of my sales back to the top where I see wines and bratwurst and even peanut butter cups are the top of my sales. I also noticed that I have some formatting issues here, so I think I'll go ahead and address those now. If I go to order details, I can choose total after discount. I'll go ahead and make that two decimal places. Perfect. Okay. So we want to create a dashboard for our sales managers. They need to be able to work through several scenarios of the data. One of the key things they ask for are the order details. I'll go ahead and add a page here. And we'll name it sales orders. I'll start by adding a table and then adding various fields to it. So I'll start with adding the company name of the customer. I also want to bring in from the orders table the order ID. Go ahead and size it out just a little bit, so I can see it populate. I also want to bring in product name. I want to bring in the quantity. Because that's a number field, it automatically tries to sum it up. I'm going to right-click it until it don't summarize. I want to bring in the unit price. I also do not want to summarize it. And then I want to bring in that total. Okay, great. I have all the basic information my sales managers will need. One of the other requests that they had was to be able to see how the sales people handle different customers. Are they just working with one customer? Or are they working with a lot of different customers? We can visualize this data using a stacked bar. So I'll click the stacked bar. I'll bring in the last name from employees. I'll go to customers, make that my legend. And since we're looking at their sales volume, I'll go back and grab that total there. Perfect. Now I can clearly see that there's a nice spread of how we help our customers here. We have several sales people, and they serve several of the same customers. We can see the total of all sales at the bottom of the table. But it would be nice if we could see that across the top. I'll go ahead and decrease the size of my stacked bar. And I'll introduce a card into the mix. I'll bring it up here. I'm not going to size too much. And I'll bring in that total after discount. That information really stands out across the top. Really easy to see it. Okay. So let's see how this interacts. Right now, we see all sales, all order details. There's lots of them. We see our scroll there. But what if I just want to focus on Sergio? I can click Sergio, and now I'm seeing only his records. What about Blankenship? Choose Blankenship. I can see the total for Blankenship, and I can see all of Blankenship sales. So this is just one way these visuals interact with each other to filter other information. Okay, I'll go ahead and click in the corner there and remove that. There are times though that we want to see other filters. Like, what about the year? What about the country? What about the customer? Again, we can see that multiple customers are served by our sales people. So I'll go ahead and create some slicers here. Set that sort back to company. I'll choose my slicer. And go ahead and sort of size it. I'll save that intricate sizing for last. The very first type of filter I want to create onto the dashboard will be the order date. I'll grab my order date hierarchy and drag that into the field list. Now, I don't really need quarter or day, just month and year is fine. And I really don't want to take up the screen space, so I'll go ahead and make this a dropdown. And that will be the same for all of my slicers so that I can be consistent. Okay. I'll go ahead and add another slicer. This slicer will be for last name. Put that into my fields list there. And again, adjust it to a dropdown. If I want to focus on a particular group of customers, then I can actually go add that slicer. I'll put in that company name. Again, that's a healthy list, so I'll make it a dropdown. I'll go ahead and size it just a little bit. And if I want to create a country dropdown list, I can do that as well. Create my last slicer here. Place it where I think it's going to go. Go ahead and do some basic sizing here to fit it all in. Don't want them to overlap. All right, perfect. Now I need to use the ship country. I don't want to use the customer's country, but where they're shipping the information, so I'll drag that ship country to field. All right. And then again, to be consistent, I'll make it a dropdown list. Okay. Now size my card over. All right. Let's watch our dashboard interact. So I want to see 2022 sales. And I only want to look at Brazil. Okay. Let's look at Germany. Excellent. I'm seeing valuable insight. Imagine that we've gotten all this data collected, and we need to use it, maybe we need to email it to these particular customers. Let me show you a very valuable feature. Now that I have these filters set, I can actually export this data. This actually creates a spreadsheet of my filtered scenario. This provides a ton of value for the user. Exporting the data out in this way provides valuable access to information. The sales managers merely need to create the scenarios. Then they can work with this data or even copy and paste it to use it into emails to share information with customers when they're not going to ever have access to our dashboards. Dashboards are amazing. And when designed effectively, they can provide a lot of value. Remember, effective being the keyword. When we take data from reading it line by line on multiple pages to being interactive, we're giving people the ability to question the data, create different scenarios and then also providing actionable insight.