Part III: Creating Charts and Other Visualizations
or possible, discussing these requests will, at a minimum, allow you to talk to your users
about additional reporting, links to other data sources, and other solutions that may help
them get the data they need.
Establishing the refresh schedule
A refresh schedule refers to the schedule by which a dashboard is updated to show the latest
information available. Because you’re the one responsible for building and maintaining the
dashboard, you should have a say in the refresh schedules, as your manager may not know
what it takes to refresh the dashboard in question.
While you’re determining the refresh schedule, keep in mind the refresh rates of the differ-
ent data sources whose measures you need to retrieve. You can’t refresh your dashboard any
faster than your data sources. Also, negotiate enough development time to build macros
that aid in automation of redundant and time-consuming refresh tasks.
Implementing Dashboard Modeling Best Practices
Most people spend very little time thinking about the supporting data model behind a
reporting process. If they think about it at all, they usually start by imagining a mock-up
of the finished dashboard and work backward from there.
Instead of seeing just the finished dashboard in your head, try to think of the end-to-end
process. Where will you get the data? How should the data be structured? What analysis
will need to be performed? How will the data be fed to the dashboard? How will the dash-
board be refreshed?
Obviously, the answers to these questions are highly situation specific. However, some data
modeling best practices will guide you to a new way of thinking about your reporting pro-
cess. These are discussed in the next few sections.
Separating data, analysis, and presentation
One of the most important concepts in a data model is the separation of data, analysis, and
presentation. The fundamental idea is that you don’t want your data to become too tied
into any one particular way of presenting that data.
To get your mind around this concept, think about an invoice. When you receive an
invoice, you don’t assume that the financial data on that invoice is the true source of your
data. It’s merely a presentation of data that’s actually stored in some database. That data
can be analyzed and presented to you in many other manners: in charts, in tables, or even
on websites. This sounds obvious, but Excel users often fuse data, analysis, and presenta-
tion together.
For instance, we’ve seen Excel workbooks that contain 12 tabs, each representing a month.
On each tab, data for that month is listed along with formulas, pivot tables, and sum-
maries. Now what happens when you’re asked to provide summary by quarter? Do you add
