Dashboards are a great way to keep an eye on your company and see all of your key metrics at a glance. A dashboard’s visualizations may be drawn from a single underlying dataset or several, as well as a single underlying report or several. Regardless of where the data is stored, a dashboard combines on-premises and cloud data to provide a consolidated view.
Dashboards vs. Reports
What are reports?
A report is a written piece or presentation that serves as a summary or explanation of a topic. You can use a report to talk about anything, from product sales to your marketing campaign pitch. To present your report, you can use text, charts, or any other combination of text and images. When writing a report, you usually concentrate on a single topic and gather lots of evidence to support it.
Why are reports and dashboards useful?
It’s crucial to keep track of your progress on projects at work and be able to update coworkers and clients on the state of your work. They are both crucial for determining which parts of a data set are most pertinent to a project and drawing conclusions from basic data. Reports and dashboards are helpful for communicating data, summarizing your work, and recording your project-related activities.
What are dashboards?
Dashboards are tools that graphically display a project’s or another subject’s status. Many metrics on a dashboard are focused on the same general topic. Dashboards provide a summary of a topic to describe the general status of a company, client, team, or individual. Dashboards are typically software applications or websites that automatically interpret data and present it in a way that users can understand.
What are the differences between reports and dashboards?
Understanding the key differences between reports and dashboards will help you choose the best method for storing or presenting your data. Here are the main distinctions between reports and dashboards:
Scope
Dashboards have a wider scope than reports. Dashboards offer a broad range of information using multiple metrics to explain the overall status of a situation in contrast to reports, which concentrate on one particular topic and provide in-depth information on that topic. For instance, you might create a financial report outlining the department’s financial situation for the most recent quarter. You concentrate on the precise earnings, losses, and other numbers related to the money you made and lost during that specific time period in the report. The report’s focus is on those metrics and what they mean for the company, as explained in the report’s scope.
A financial dashboard can be used to monitor the business’s financial performance. The dashboard may include various metrics, such as total labor hours worked, the number of prospects in the sales pipeline as of the current date, sales to date, current expenses as compared to the overall budget, and current expenses. You can look at various charts, graphs, and other visual comparisons of various metrics by navigating the dashboard. This broad scope provides anyone using the dashboard with a general understanding of the company’s financial health at any given time.
Interpretation
Reports and dashboards interpret information differently. People create reports and offer their own interpretations of the information. By contrasting it with other instances of a similar nature, they can offer their analysis of trends and insights into what the data means. Reports frequently include paragraphs of text that define the significance of various graphs, charts, and trends. On the basis of your individual evaluation and analysis of the data, they might also contain advice and recommendations.
Dashboards are an objective collection of information. They dont include additional insights and interpretation. Some dashboards might have tools for projecting trends and making projections based on historical data, but these lack input from outside sources. Dashboards primarily calculate, compile, and present user-inputted data from a database or other sources in a variety of formats.
Purpose
You can create a report for several reasons. Reports are frequently written to update your team on a project, communicate company information to staff and shareholders, present an idea to a client, or to summarize the findings of an assignment once it has been completed. Reports are frequently used to inform presentations, but you can also present them on your own for people to evaluate. Reports are incredibly flexible documents that you can customize for any particular purpose.
A dashboard’s main function is to track a situation’s progress. People working on a project can review key performance indicators to see if they need to change their workflow in order to meet their objectives. Typically, businesses give multiple users access to the same dashboard to promote accountability and increase team access to data. People can use dashboards to check the progress of a project and, using that information, communicate with their coworkers.
Format
Most reports are simple pages-based documents that you can print or save as a digital file. Some prepare reports using slides so they can deliver the information to a group of people. With this format, it’s simple to include different elements like charts, graphs, and visual aids. Dashboards are frequently interactive, so they need a software interface like a website. This enables users to select features, click on buttons, and choose what information they want to view for each metric.
What are the similarities between reports and dashboards?
You can take into account the following dashboard and report similarities when using both tools:
FAQ
What is dashboard type reports?
…
Salesforce Reports.
- Tabular Reports.
- Summary Reports.
- Matrix Report.
- Joined Report.
What’s the difference between a report a dashboard and a dataset?
- Navigate to the Dashboards tab.
- Select All Folders listed on the left-hand side. …
- In the row with the name of your Dashboard Folder, click the carrot.
- Select Share from the dropdown.
- Share with Public Groups or Users, View Access, in the new pop-up window
- Click Share, and then Done.
Why are reports and dashboards important?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) for your company are displayed visually in dashboard reporting. Dashboard visuals provide charts and graphs to give a quick overview of your company’s performance using data from other reports.
What is a dashboard?
Dashboards are created from multiple datasets or reports. Dashboards consistently focus on developing insights into the data using graphs, eye-catching visuals, charts, etc. Reports focus more on creating summary pages than they do on the data visualization portion of the report.
