Understanding Dashboards and Metrics Displays

This class will serve as a practical guide to create useful, informative, actionable dashboards and real-time metrics displays.

Businesses are storing more and more information, yet struggle to analyze and make decisions off of this new data. Effective data visualization is the easiest, most efficient way to identify and communicate the key insights that are hidden in the numbers.

Takeaways

• Learn to pick the right metrics/key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Create dashboards that are clear and easy to maintain.
  Use visualizations to identify exceptions, failures, and other issues.
• Create automated metrics displays.
• Learn to choose the right visualization tool for the job.

Prerequisites and preparation

Basic knowledge of Excel formulas and charts is helpful, but we will go over the basics (if you can get through this you should be fine). No programming knowledge is necessary, but we will cover a tiny bit of web technology to get certain real time displays working.

Preparation: Please bring a laptop. We will have sample data sets, but students are encouraged to bring their own data as well.