Add Dashboard Items and Perform Basic Data Shaping
- 3 minutes to read
After creating a dashboard and providing data to it, add dashboard items to display visual and textual information in a dashboard.
Refer to the Designing Dashboard Items document for a complete list of available dashboard items.
Add a Grid
Click the Grid button in the Toolbox or drag and drop this item onto the dashboard surface.
This creates a new configurable Grid dashboard item.
Select the item and open its Bindings menu to see the data source to which this item is bound and empty placeholders for providing data.
Click Add Column and choose the CategoryName data field in the invoked list.
Add one more column and select the ExtendedPrice field.
In this example, the first column is a dimension and the second column as a measure. Both these values can be of any type - string, date-time or numeric.
- The dimension is used to provide discrete categorical information. The dashboard does not summarize the dimension values, but groups identical values. You can perform grouping, sorting, or display the top values for the dimension values.
- The measure is used to summarize data against grouped dimension values. The dashboard calculates an appropriate summary function against measure values. You can also customize the data format settings that affect how summary values are displayed.
The dashboard calculates Sum for numeric measures by default. You can select the required summary function in the Summary Type drop-down list.
Expand the Format section and apply required currency formatting to this column.
Select the CategoryName column, expand the Options section and specify the desired caption.
Open the Data Shaping section and select the ExtendedPrice column in the Sort By drop-down list to sort grid data against summary values calculated for the selected measure. You can choose the ascending or descending sort order.
Add a Chart
Click the Chart button in the Toolbox to add a new chart item to the dashboard.
Open the chart’s Bindings menu, click the Add Values placeholder and select the ExtendedPrice field.
Click Add Argument and select the OrderDate data field. The Group Interval property is set to Year by default. The chart now displays extended price values for each year.
Add one more OrderDate argument and set its Group Interval option to Quarter to display data hierarchically.
Add a Pie
Click the Pies button in the Toolbox to add a Pie item that shows each value’s contribution to a total.
In the Bindings menu, specify the ExtendedPrice data field for values and the SalesPerson field for arguments of this pie.
Add Cards
Add the Card dashboard item by clicking the corresponding button in the Toolbox.
Invoke the Bindings menu, click Add Card and select the ExtendedPrice data field for calculating values displayed within cards. Click Add Series and select the Country field used to label cards. Then, click Add Sparkline and choose the OrderDate field to visualize the variation of card values over time.
View the Result
The following image demonstrates the resulting dashboard:
