The Great Dashboard Series: Dashboards vs Reports; the Finale

Ok, here it goes.. You have been assigned to present your company's sales data and you can’t decide whether you should use a report or develop a dashboard.

The clock is ticking… You google “Should I use a dashboard or a report?” and you still find something that leaves you more confused than before… Sounds familiar?

This article will help you better understand the difference and similarities between dashboard vs reports  and it will help you better understand when you need to use one or the other.

What is a Dashboard?

Dashboards are a visual representation of specific metrics for a central business question that can be further customized and tailored to a user’s needs. Typically dashboards are dynamic tools that can have real-time data updates that show changes minute by minute. Dashboards can typically be used as standalone dashboards or they can be related to multiple others that better organize a company’s analytics.

And just like the your car’s dashboard is centered around your car’s performance, your data dashboard should be focused on answering the central question you have associated with it i.e. “How is the business doing?”; “How is our staff doing?” and more. 

What is a Report?

Reports are static documents that contain data in text and table form. They are usually organized to highlight specific KPIs and data sets. Reports usually show a snapshot of a specific period and therefore the data isn’t updated at real-time.  Reports can also be a series of dashboards that may be interrelated to each other and as a whole show more of the information needed to understand the status of things.

So what should I use: a dashboard or a report?

It all depends on your data needs. Create a dashboard when you mean to provide high-level insight into a complex system, particularly for an executive or other high-ranking person. Such individuals are often responsible for making quick decisions, and dashboards accelerate time to insight. Dashboards are also useful investigative tools and therefore helpful to anyone in a diagnostic role or situation.

So whenever you have to decide between using a dashboard or a report, remember the purpose of your summary. A report provides a more detailed collection of tables, charts, and graphs and it is used for a detailed, full analysis while a dashboard is used for monitoring what is going on. Put in another way, the report can provide a more detailed view of the information that is presented on a dashboard.

The Great Dashboard Series is a tribute to the dashboards we have scraped, the countless hours we spent creating complex but beautiful graphs only to have people still ask what we were trying to show.