best practices for dashboard presentation

Dashboard Presentation and Storytelling: 6 Best Practices to Start With

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“Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form,” said Jean Luc Godard. A quote fully applicable to data.

Data may often seem complex and challenging to present in a comprehensible way, especially when your audience doesn’t have a high level of data knowledge. However, more and more companies aim to make data-driven decisions nowadays, so you’re likely to be in a situation where you need data to make your case or justify your budget.

Whether you’re presenting to your manager, senior management, or shareholders, your best bet is to create a compelling story using your data.

That’s where dashboard presentations and storytelling step in.

In this article, you’ll learn:

What Is Dashboard Storytelling?

Benefits of using dashboards to tell stories about your data, what is more important: storytelling or data presentation, how to get started with dashboard storytelling 3 tips, how to present a dashboard: 6 best practices to make a meaningful dashboard storytelling presentation, dashboard storytelling examples.

Dashboard storytelling is the process of creating a compelling narrative around your data and KPIs to illustrate your business performance and influence your audience in a way, usually through interactive, engaging visualizations.

Dashboards allow you to present your narrative in an easy-to-understand manner and adapt it to the audience you’re reporting to. Through dashboard storytelling, you combine the power of stories to engage the listeners and the conclusiveness of the real-time data presented through graphs, charts, tables, and more.

Related : How to Visualize Data: 6 Rules, Tips and Best Practices

Storytelling is a powerful marketing tool because it helps you relate to your audience and sound compelling. So, what are the benefits of using dashboards to tell stories about your data? Here are 4 ways dashboard storytelling helps you present your data in a more convincing way.

• You can make the report easy to follow and understand. Your audience may get lost in a 20-page report with too much text. When you use a dashboard, you can get your point across in a more comprehensive way without losing your audience’s attention. Clear visuals allow you to illustrate your findings and corroborate your arguments.
• You can use color-coding. Dashboards allow you to use colors to give meaning to your data. For example, figures written in green mean a positive outcome, while any data displayed in red would mean a negative result.
• You can make the report interactive. While the traditional reports are static and don’t allow for changes once you create them, dashboards are interactive. You can click on your charts and tables to compare current with previous performance, set a custom date range, etc, and uncover more details about a specific KPI.
• You can provide valuable information about your performance at a glance. Dashboards are designed to let you draw conclusions quickly. By taking one look at the dashboard, you can understand what’s happening in your business, which makes your data storytelling engaging and dynamic.

We surveyed 46 companies about dashboards and storytelling. The respondents come from:

• B2C services or products (41.30%)
• B2B services or products (34.78%)
• Agency/Consultant: Marketing, Digital or Media (23.91%)

Over 96% of survey participants have been using both dashboards and storytelling to convey their messages, while the rest of the participants would like to try.

The companies we surveyed give almost equal importance to both dashboards and storytelling: 52% of respondents gave their vote to storytelling, while 48% of them consider dashboard presentations should have more emphasis. However, almost all participants in the survey agree that data visualization is very important for overall success of dashboard storytelling.

If you’re only getting started with dashboard storytelling and ditch the basic reports, these three tips will help you fast-track your first presentation.

Match the Data with the Right Visualizations

Not every type of data will work with every type of visualization, so take your time to carefully review your options and choose the most suitable chart, graph, table, or another visualization for your data. For example, bar charts are excellent for showing progress over time, while pie charts work best to display data distribution.

Don’t Go Overboard with Industry Jargon

Your narrative should be simple, which means too much industry jargon may make you sound incomprehensible. Your audience may not understand all the terms you use, especially if you’re presenting to other teams or the C-suite. Technical jargon and popular buzzwords don’t contribute any value to your presentation, while simple language can boost its efficiency and clarity.

Make Sure Your Story Follows a Logical Order

People love to listen to stories regardless of the topic, but can only follow if there’s a logical order of events. A well-organized dashboard will make sure your report tells a story explaining the causes, and consequences of different activities that impacted your performance. Keeping your focus on point and clearly communicating the purpose of your presentation will help you deliver value.

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To collect the best tips on making a meaningful dashboard presentation, we asked companies from various industries to share their experience. Among our respondents, there are almost 24% of marketing, digital, and media consultants and agencies, around 35% of B2B companies, and around 41% of B2C products or service providers.

The participants in our survey consider marketing dashboards the most inspiring one for storytelling: 39% of companies gave it their vote. Other common answers included overall business, customer support, and sales dashboards.

Here are the 6 best practices we singled out to ensure you make a meaningful dashboard presentation.

Outline Your Presentation to Visualize the Structure

Mix up the facts with real-life anecdotes and examples, encourage interaction while telling the story, highlight the value of the presentation, test multiple approaches to storytelling with data, focus on consistency in your presentation.

Structure gives your presentation clarity and logical flow, so before you dive deep into the data itself and storytelling, create a presentation outline. The outline will help you build your story around key points and maintain focus throughout.

Vishal Srivastava of Trainedge Consulting Pvt Ltd recommends the GIFBP framework for this purpose.

“It stands for Goals, Issues, Features, Benefits and Proof. I pick data/visualization from dashboards to go with each section of the story. The key is to keep the story short and focused, which means using the most appropriate chart/illustration. Using too many can cause data overload and confusion, so you need to be careful about what you represent,” explains Srivastava and gives an example:

“Let’s say I am sharing monthly inbound performance for a self-service SaaS product. The goal here is the monthly growth in MRR or a target MRR. So the first slide will compare the actual MRR with the target. The Issues element focuses on what is preventing us from achieving the goal or could do that in the coming months. No more than 3 Issues, backed by data – falling trial signup rate/paid conversion rates, slower traffic growth, topping out high converting traffic from search, etc.

The Features section will highlight what we are doing to stay the course or pre-empt future issues. Back that up with data about progress made. The benefits section lists out how the actions will help us hit the goal in the future. The Proof section lists out evidence, in the form of charts/data, to show that the actions are actually moving the needle in the right direction.”

Asking the right data analysis questions can help you determine which top issues you will present in your dashboard. For example:

• What exactly do I want to learn from this?
• Where does my data come from and is it reliable?
• Which KPIs will I include, and more.

Your dashboard presentation doesn’t need to occur in a solemn atmosphere: storytelling works better if intertwined with anecdotes and real-life examples and experiences. The human touch makes your story more relatable.

Showing a bit of emotion will make your message more compelling, especially if you focus on personalizing the story. Whether it’s your own anecdote or a funny story from your client, adding an emotional aspect to it can help connect all story elements together in a more effective way. Peter Lee of Famlee Digital confirms that adding a personal touch can boost the presentation:

“For my business, I’ve found that being able to tell the story of what has happened, what is happening, and what we predict will happen has been really beneficial. Each client is addressed on a personal basis relevant to their business,” says Peter.

Audience should come first—while creating the presentation, think about what’s in it for your listeners, whether they’re your team members, business partners, shareholders, managers, or clients. Answer the questions such as who they are and what they’re expecting from the presentation.

“Once you know that, you can start planning your presentation. You should focus on metrics and results. How did things go? What did we achieve? What changes will we make in order to improve future processes? This way, audience members will not only be informed but also inspired by what they heard or saw. I also recommend keeping an eye on future steps and keeping them in mind when planning your presentation because it will help you stay focused on what really matters: goals,” says Masha Mahdavi of SEM Dynamics .

Leszek Dudkiewicz of Passport Photo Online agrees that “listening to a presentation containing only text and illustrations is tedious. The more boring the presentation is, the harder it is for the audience to keep their attention on its content.” Stories you can base on interactive dashboards help you keep your audience engaged.

Before you start telling the story, the audience should know what its purpose is and what value you’re going to deliver.

“In my experience, the most important practice to use in dashboard storytelling is to put the audience first. At the end of the day, your audience will always ask, “What’s in it for me?”, says Caitlyn Parish of Cicinia Bridesmaid Dresses .

To make the value of the presentation clear to your audience, state the purpose right at the beginning.

“Every story needs to start with a purpose. We ask questions concerning the major takeaway that our data story presents. We always ensure that our end goal is to influence our audience to take specific action”, says David Antoni of Virtocommerce .

The more actionable the presentation, the better. After all, the main reporting goal is to plan the next steps to maintain great performance or improve it as needed.

Multiple approaches may work for different audiences, so be prepared to test several ways to tell a story with your data. Some audiences will love to participate and ask questions, while others will want you to be as concise as possible and give them the main takeaways only.

We already mentioned one possible framework for a dashboard presentation. Here’s another suggestion from Vanda Mahas of Code200 :

“We prefer using the CAR framework – analyze context, hypothesis and take action, and review results. We use graphs or other visuals from the dashboard for providing context to the hypotheses”, shares Mahas.

The story based on the data on your dashboard should have a logical flow and lead to specific conclusions.

That can also include the use of visualizations and colors—make sure you use the same visualization types for similar data sets, as it’ll allow the audience to understand the dashboard better. That way, your listeners will be able to understand the key points: what is happening, why it might be happening, and what should be done about it.

Maria McDowell of EasySearchPeople explains what her process of preparing a dashboard presentation looks like:

“I usually start collecting and arranging the data I have, setting an outline and flow for the presentation, then I start building my presentation. I like to keep an eye on consistency and flow. I like to be sure that the copy remains on topic and that the story flows well for the audience.”

Again, the key is to focus on the audience—if you lose the flow in your story, the lack of clarity may also cost you the engagement from your audience.

“I also keep the audience in mind, who is the audience? What are their needs? What am I presenting to them? In what format would they prefer to see it?”, asks McDowell.

To illustrate the points we’ve made so far, we’re sharing a few dashboard presentation examples of storytelling opportunities that will help you create memorable interactive reports.

Single Metric Performance Over Time

Progress towards goals, multi-parameter comparisons.

The Single Metric Performance over Time dashboard allows you to create a narrative around the progress of a chosen metric. From this dashboard, you can easily evaluate your efforts over a specific time period and determine whether they’ve given the desired results.

If you need to track the efficiency of your strategy, whether it’s marketing or sales, and present your performance in front of your managers, the Progress Towards Goals dashboard is ideal. Here, you can track even short-term goals and make sure you’re on the right track every step of the way.

When you need to deep dive into the details of why traffic drops or spikes are happening on your website, so you can fix the issue or grab the opportunity, you need a drill-down report . The Multi-Parameter Comparisons dashboard is a great choice to analyze several metrics that influence your overall performance, all at once.

Share Meaningful Data Stories with Databox

Reports don’t have to be endless, boring, and monotonous. They can be fun, engaging, and beautiful.

By using dashboards to tell stories about your performance, successes, and lessons, you can streamline your reporting process, make it more interactive, and speed up the actionable steps that will follow each dashboard presentation.

But do you need to create dashboards and reports from scratch every time you have a presentation?

With Databox, you don’t. You can choose from hundreds of templates available in our library and customize the dashboard to fit your requirements. Connect your dashboard to virtually any data source from our list of 100+ integrations and track your performance from any device.

Want to learn more about how Databox works? Create a free account today and start telling memorable stories with your data.

Dashboard Templates

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Stefana Zarić is a freelance writer & content marketer. Other than writing for SaaS and fintech clients, she educates future writers who want to build a career in marketing. When not working, Stefana loves to read books, play with her kid, travel, and dance.

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Home Blog Business How to Design a Dashboard Presentation: A Step-by-Step Guide

How to Design a Dashboard Presentation: A Step-by-Step Guide

What do all businesses have in common? They all create data. Nevertheless, they differ in how they use the data to make informed business decisions.

Are you ready to make better decisions for your business? Do you want to use the data your business piles up effectively? It’s time to start using dashboard presentations.

This quick guide will take you on a journey to create a data dashboard presentation highlighting metrics and KPIs needed to make essential decisions about any business scenario.

Table of Contents

• What is a Dashboard Presentation?
• Why do you need a Dashboard for your business?

Anatomy of an Effective Dashboard Presentation

• Metrics and KPIs to include in your dashboard

Step-by-Step Guide to creating a dashboard presentation

How to present a dashboard in powerpoint, recommended state-of-the-art tools to create a dashboard, a quick look at excel dashboards, closing thoughts, what is a dashboard presentation .

A data dashboard is a versatile and practical tool for making important decisions. It’s the solution to time-consuming data research that expands across multiple locations. 

In business, you have various tools to keep you informed on performance and growth. Your sales platforms, marketing applications, and customer service software collect data. Looking through data on different locations takes up time, and that’s where custom dashboards come in. 

Dashboards bring together data in one place to answer specific questions and tell stories about your business. Data dashboards can be created in several ways, depending on their level of interactivity and real-time data updates. 

To be truly effective, a dashboard needs a hierarchical strategy. One or more main dashboards answer the big questions, while others answer specific questions per team, time frame, or campaign. 

Live dashboards update at regular intervals, pulling data from many sources simultaneously, offering a real-time overview of the big picture. 

Dashboard presentations display data for a specific point in time, a snapshot to share with stakeholders and managers. This is the type of presentation you can create today using PowerPoint and editable presentation templates by SlideModel.

Why do you need a Dashboard for your business? 

Every business generates data about customers, employees, production lines, communication platforms, etc. All the collected data is valuable information for making informed business decisions. That said, only some in a company know how to manually dig into data spreadsheets to find trends, sudden changes, and other business metrics. A dashboard fixes that.

Not all business data lives in the same place, most of which isn’t visual. In a dashboard, you bring together data from different sources, choose the metrics you need for that dashboard and make it all look coherent and easy to understand.

There are more benefits than setbacks when using dashboards, especially when they’re created efficiently and follow a straightforward data story.

Here’s a list of the most significant benefits of using dashboard presentations in your meetings and strategy sessions:

• Data dashboard presentations help you and your team make better, more informed decisions.
• They provide a coherent and detailed overview of your business’ KPIs and metrics for a specific strategy, campaign, or hypothesis.
• Dashboard presentations facilitate analysis and understanding of how different metrics and dimensions have different outcomes.
• They improve accountability in a team as everyone can see what needs improvement and what is reaching set benchmarks.
• Using data dashboards as a team makes sense. To work together towards a common goal, everyone must know what’s at stake.

How to Design an Efficient Dashboard Presentation  

Creating a dashboard presentation for the first time can feel a bit daunting. This guide takes you step-by-step through the process from strategy to completion.

Click on the sections below if you’d like to skip ahead.

The layout for a dashboard presentation depends on the aspect ratio you need to work with. The aspect ratio will depend on how your audience views and uses the dashboard.

For a desktop or computer view, a horizontal 16:9 ratio is suitable. A scrolling dashboard is better on mobile devices—just remember to highlight the hierarchy in the data. The optimal dashboard presentation is responsive to different screen sizes. 

Before we get into the KPIs and the step-by-step guide, let’s visualize the anatomy of a dashboard presentation. Here are some actionable guidelines to help you.

Giving the dashboard a title

The dashboard title doesn’t need to be too large; remember that you need space in the canvas to display the data. If necessary, include a subtitle with essential information. Don’t add it if it’s not needed to understand the dashboard. 

The location of the title is preferably at the top left or top center. To the left, leaves space to the right for a couple of data points; the centered option will have white space on the sides.

Grouping Big numbers and data visualizations

The most efficient way to organize the information on your dashboard is to group the data points into relevant categories. Creating these groups has two purposes; it helps with the overall layout and hierarchy of the dashboard, and it supports the cognitive analysis done by the viewer.

As you create groups of data points, place similar visualizations inside groups to maintain a visual balance. For example, at the very top, it’s common to have a horizontal section with a group of big numbers. 

Big numbers are data points that highlight an exact number or value at a specific time. Some big numbers include; overall revenue, profit, number of followers, number of support calls completed, etc. Likewise, big numbers can be the percentage reached towards a goal or the progress of a specific action. 

Group data visualizations or similar charts into more sections to place below the big numbers. This technique uses human reading patterns to create a visual hierarchy for the dashboard, making it easier to understand at a glance.

Adding visual metaphors

There’s no need to use just numbers and charts inside a dashboard. Take advantage of visual metaphors to help highlight the data in their sections. This is a common technique for creating infographics . 

A dashboard’s most used visual metaphor is a data point’s negative or positive impact. For this purpose, you can add arrows , color labels, up and down thumbs, happy and sad faces, or a visual thermometer highlighting the current amount of money collected in a fundraising campaign. Which style, depends on the dashboard’s business tone. For a financial dashboard, color labels are enough, but emojis are just as adequate for a young startup’s sales rep dashboard.

Crafting legends and captions 

Data points and data point groups will be more precise with a caption or label accompanying them. Place short labels in the exact location in each group, and place legends in similar areas to each data point. This visual consistency makes the data easier to review.

We can’t stress enough how important it is to choose the right font for your dashboard. It needs to be easy to read at small sizes and consistent throughout the layout. Forget about using two fonts or more. Use one and highlight selected text with bold or italic styling.

Supporting analysis with filters

Adding filters to a dashboard is a choice you’ll have to make with your team. First, why filters? A filter is a selection tool to choose between views in the dashboard. Standard filters include time frame, location, people, etc.

Regarding dashboard presentations, filters don’t work the same way as they do on Excel dashboards. In an Excel dashboard, filters are integrated into the data points. When used, the data in the dashboard changes dynamically. You’ll have to create separate views on different slides in a dashboard presentation.

Metrics and KPIs to include in your dashboard 

The content in a dashboard is metrics, dimensions, and KPIs , but how do you know which ones to include? There’s no one answer to this question; every dashboard is different. But thankfully, there are some general foundations you can follow.

First, you need to know the strategy to determine what metrics and KPIs you’ll need. Think of this as a playbook for every dashboard you create.

• Have a clear grasp of the dashboard’s purpose and goal. Know the answers to the questions in Step 1 of the step-by-step guide.
• Formulate one or more hypotheses or questions as a base for the analysis.
• Study the data you have on hand and select the metrics and KPIs that highlight what you need to know about your hypothesis or question.
• Outline the data sets in a hierarchy of importance and relevance.

This playbook will guide your decision on what metrics and KPIs to use, regardless of your profession and industry. Here are some example KPIs and templates to help give you a better idea

A social media dashboard that asks questions about engagement and brand awareness would use weekly KPIs like:

• Follower growth
• Engagement to follower count ratio
• Measurement of clicks on links
• Hashtag tracking
• Comment and DM tracking
• Best all-around post

The marketing dashboard template below highlights the following:

• Conversions
• Browser preference
• Performance

Download it to start using it with PowerPoint to create your following marketing dashboard. If you’re looking for marketing campaign dashboards, browse our template gallery.

A retail company asks for a dashboard highlighting how online and in-store sales are leveling up after the pandemic. These would be good KPIs to include:

• Overall sales in the stores and online
• Product category sales that differ in online and in-store purchases
• Trends over time
• Return rates for online and in-store sales
• Demographic data about the customer

Below is one of our sales dashboard templates . There’s a summary dashboard on the first slide and consecutive slides with detailed data. These are some of the metrics it highlights:

• Weekly sales
• Product share
• Predicted vs. actual sales
• Sales over time

Customer Service/Support

A dashboard highlighting the successes and fails of the customer support team would use metrics like these :

• Customer satisfaction score
• Customer effort score
• Total tickets + tickets per customer
• Volume by channel (chat, phone, email, etc.)
• First response time
• Average handle time
• Cost per resolution
• Net promoter score

Look at this customer service KPI dashboard template that uses most KPIs mentioned above. Note that first response time and average handle time are all metrics you can get from your business phone system .

Project Management

These are the common metrics in a project dashboard , you can add or take away depending on your particular dashboard purpose:

• Planned Value 
• Actual Cost
• Earned Value 
• Cost Variance (Planned Budget vs. Actual Budget)
• Cost Performance Index 
• Planned hours of work vs. actual situation

Alternatively, you can use a roadmap dashboard with a Gantt chart and other important KPIs highlighting progress.

Financial Operations 

Financial dashboards tend to get very busy visually. They usually also have more line charts than others. Here are a few of the most common KPIs for a financial dashboard presentation.

• Operating Cash Flow (OCF)
• Current Ratio
• Net Profit Margin
• Sales Growth
• Vendor Expenses

This financial dashboard template , for example, has 12 data points in one space. It’s a great example of how design and dashboard storytelling techniques help create a beautiful dashboard.

If you need a quick method to create a dashboard presentation, check out our AI presentation maker . A tool in which you add the topic, curate the outline, select a design, and let AI do the work for you.

Now it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty, the how-to for creating a dashboard presentation

These steps cover what you need to know to create an efficient dashboard presentation with PowerPoint and SlideModel. 

Step 1: Define the purpose of your dashboard presentation

Dashboards are born from a business need, a way to quickly analyze data and make informed decisions. That’s why it’s essential to know your dashboard’s purpose before you do anything. 

It could be as broad as a CEO saying they have 30 seconds to see a dashboard once a week. Or a high-level manager wants to see an overview of the activity in their department at the Monday morning meetings. And yet another could be the social media manager’s need to show progress over time regarding a specific campaign.

Here are the questions you need to answer before continuing:

• Who will be the end users?
• What are their key business goals and objectives?
• What are the most important questions they need answers to?
• How frequently will the dashboard be reviewed?

With the answers to this checklist, you’re ready to go on to the next step.

Step 2: Choose the right metrics for your purpose

Above, we show you how to choose the KPIs for your dashboard. You might already have some data inside several business platforms’ analytics sections. Others you might have to source in other ways. 

As you collect the data, analyze the level of detail you’ll need to visualize. It will help later when transforming the data from its original form to a data visualization on the dashboard.

For each data point, take note of what it’s highlighting. What exact question is it answering? These will turn into legends and captions when you put them all together.

Step 3: Present the data effectively

With the metrics and KPIs collected, it’s time to present them on the dashboard. It’s essential to write down a hierarchical outline of the data points. Start with the most critical data according to the question the dashboard aims to answer. 

For each data point, select a style of visualization; big numbers, percentages, bar charts, simplified line graphs, and arrays. Write it all down on the outline. Use big numbers at the top of the dashboard to highlight the most influential data. Don’t use too many data visualization of the same style together; the repetition affects the viewer’s attention. 

Before adding the data to PowerPoint, prepare your charts to export them easily. Ensure the data is cleaned and revised, and there’s no extra irrelevant information. 

Step 4: Eliminate visual clutter and noise

Once you have all the KPIs on the dashboard, check for unnecessary visual material. Are you using the same font for all data points? Is the color unified across the design? How about text size and alignment?

Give each data point a margin of space around it. Keep the distance between data points and groups similar in size. Keep lines as straight as possible without much overlap between data points. Resize and shape each data point so it aligns neatly on the dashboard.

Check the text in the chart and graph legends. Make sure to keep all legends and labels similar in size and easy to read. Don’t use colored text or styled text unless it serves a purpose.

Step 5: Use the layout to focus attention

To structure the layout of your dashboard, take note of the human act of reading. People read from left to right, starting in the top left corner of the page or screen. Their gaze continues in a back-and-forth motion that resembles the letters Z and F. Knowing where your viewer will most likely look first, place your most important, high-level data in their line of sight.

Remember to combine similar data points to create visual separations in the layout. Help the viewer follow the flow of information with subtle design elements like color, size, and position. Apply Gestalt principles like proximity and similarity to group elements together.

Step 6: Tell a clear story

Why is it important to tell a story with data on your dashboard? If you were to phrase your dashboard’s purpose as a question or hypothesis, the data would be the answer. Use descriptive titles and labels to help the viewer understand the data in order of importance.

As the viewer scans the data on the dashboard, comprehension must start at the top with the top-level data points. These answer the most immediate question of the dashboard’s purpose, like the opener of a story or essay. The story continues with the rest of the data points, which will complete the analysis. 

When you tell a clear story with the help of a hierarchic layout, descriptive titles, and labels, the data story flows naturally. To achieve a compelling data story for your dashboard, ask for feedback from your team and edit the layout until it makes sense.

Presenting a dashboard on PowerPoint is simple. Depending on what type of dashboard you need, there’s a way to do it. 

You only need the collected data and one of our dashboard templates to create and present a static dashboard presentation with PowerPoint. The step-by-step guide above will help. 

For dynamic and interactive dashboards in PowerPoint, you’ll have to connect to your live data on Excel using a tool like Presentation Point . Alternatively, you can embed Power BI and Excel dashboards into your PowerPoint slides.

Let’s take a quick look at the recommended data dashboard tools. For a static dashboard presentation, our preferred tool is PowerPoint. But for highly interactive and dynamic dashboards with live data updates, you’ll need something else.

Looker Studio (previously Google Data Studio)

Looker Studio is the new name of Google Data Studio. With this tool, you can create dashboards and reports to showcase and highlight KPIs regardless of your business type. Adding a Looker Studio dashboard to a PowerPoint presentation isn’t ideal. There’s no intuitive process, and it isn’t recommended. Looker Studio is better suited for teams that work with the G-Suite.

Microsoft Excel

Excel dashboards are a classic reporting staple in the world of business. You can create elaborate dashboards with dynamic and interactive features using data sources, reference tables, and pivot tables. Stay tuned if you have ever wondered how to create an Excel dashboard that updates automatically.

Power BI (Business Intelligence) is a Microsoft tool for visualizing data insights that help make better business decisions. It is the tool of choice for big companies with large amounts of data to be analyzed. Connecting and embedding Power BI dashboards to PowerPoint is simple since they’re both from Microsoft.

Tableau is similar to Power BI in that they are both data visualization platforms that improve business intelligence. Tableau dashboards are a great alternative to Power BI and can also be embedded into a PowerPoint presentation. 

SlideModel + PowerPoint

Finally, the combo between SlideModel and PowerPoint comes into the picture. This duo is your best friend when creating static dashboard presentations.

Use SlideModel dashboard presentation templates to create a static dashboard that gives an insightful overview of some aspects of your business. Share the dashboard with your team and make better decisions together.

To create a live data dashboard presentation with SlideModel and PowerPoint, try Presentation Point, a tool to help bring live data into your presentations. Alternatively, you can try our AI PowerPoint generator to create a custom companion slide deck for your presentation topic.

As we mentioned above, Excel is an epic tool for business dashboards. It’s more accessible than Power BI and easier to use than Tableau (especially if you’re already an Excel pro). To create an Excel dashboard, you need to set up at least four sheets that work together to highlight the KPIs. They are:

• Data source sheets  
• Reference tables sheets   
• Pivot Tables sheets 
• The Dashboard sheet 

The best part about creating Excel dashboards is the possibility of building dynamic dashboards with data that updates automatically. Our favorite part? You can then embed it in PowerPoint and use SlideModel templates to make it all visually cohesive.

If you didn’t already know, dashboards are unique. They’ve been fantastic business tools for years. It’s no surprise they’ve jumped to other information design fields. For example, dashboard-style CVs! 

Creating a static data dashboard presentation (as a CV or for your business) is much easier when you know your needed tools. Some are easier than others, while others are too much for your needs.

Since you’re creating a data dashboard presentation with static data, you only need a PowerPoint and SlideModel. Browse our library to find digital marketing dashboard templates, HR dashboard templates, and lots more. 

Here’s to your next presentation dashboard. May it be the best you’ve ever made.

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Dashboard Design

This guide showcases seven key best practices for dashboard design to help you create better dashboards. Dashboards are essential tools in transforming your data into business value, but no single approach works best for every purpose.

DASHBOARD DESIGN GUIDE

7 dashboard design best practices.

Well-designed dashboards use data to tell a story for a specific audience. There’s no simple trick or single approach that will achieve this goal for every purpose and audience. But following the best practices described below can help you succeed for your specific needs.

1. Know Your Audience

The first critical step in designing your dashboard is to develop a user persona that defines who your audience is, what information they need, and how they will use this information. Some dashboards have broad distribution but most are tailored to specific people or roles such as executives, managers or analysts. These roles have very different needs and expectations when it comes to data.

For example, an analyst will want many data views and the ability to dig into the data to explore more deeply. In contrast, a busy operations manager needs to know at a glance if there are significant deviations from the norm that require immediate action.

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2. Choose the Right Type of Dashboard Design

Once you have defined the audience and purpose for your dashboard, make sure to choose the type of dashboard that aligns. There are four main types of business intelligence dashboards based on their purpose: strategic, operational, tactical and analytical. Below we discuss the main attributes and give  dashboard examples  of each type as inspiration.

Executive Dashboards

These dashboards allow executives to track key performance indicators ( KPI s) over time. The purpose here is to analyze bigger-picture trends over longer time periods rather than focusing on immediate, short term actions.The example below shows how hospital executives can use an  executive dashboard  to visualize strategic KPIs relevant to management, patient experience, and staff dynamics.

1. High-level KPIs give executives a big-picture view of critical success factors. 2. Predictions indicate whether key indicators are performing better or worse than expected. 3. Time-based trends provide a view of overall activity, and can be shared with higher-level management as needed

Operational Dashboards

The purpose of operational dashboards is to quickly tell the user what’s happening in the moment and to highlight when and where critical issues occur. Use this type of dashboard for time-sensitive information and to highlight deviations in the data so that users can take action.For example, a police force can use an operational dashboard to track the location and volume of police reports and provide a snapshot of incidents teams should be prepared to deal with.

1. Heatmaps make it easy to quickly spot areas where activity levels are high. 2. Log tracking over time helps teams predict what time of day workloads will be highest. 3. Log types provide a quick snapshot of the kind of incidents teams should be prepared to deal with.

Tactical Dashboards

Tactical dashboards help users track progress toward specific goals or time periods. Users should be able to click on the dashboard to quickly and easily drill in to the data on the dashboard itself to explore problems and opportunities.In this example, a software company can use a tactical dashboard to make faster, better informed decisions with information on browsing and purchase behavior, interactions across digital channels, and more.

1. Key data points are enhanced by trending information; how much this number changed from the prior month. 2. More detailed insights can be found by drilling down into additional data. 3. A day-to-day view allows teams to look more closely at activity and what caused it.

Analytical Dashboards

Analytical dashboards are typically created and used by analysts as an interactive tool to help them better support business people in analyzing trends and identifying issues. They usually have minimal graphic elements and instead strive to present as many data views as possible. Here especially, the user needs to be able to drill down into additional data for more detailed analysis.The example below showcases how a CPG company can use an analytics dashboard to track trends, forecast market share, and compare sales against competitors.

1. Viewing market valuation over time helps guide business decisions. 2. Forecasts can be used alongside other data to drive business planning and resourcing. 3. Comparison data shows sales versus key competitors in an easy-to-read, side-by-side format.

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3. Identify Your Key Metrics

Your audience may tell you they want “everything” and that every data point is important. Your job in dashboard design is to help them choose the essential metrics to best help them align behaviors, refine strategy, and measure success. For example, a marketing team that’s rewarded based on the number of people reached needs different metrics than one rewarded for qualified leads. When in doubt, stick to the 80/20 rule. Don’t try to account for everything but instead focus on the 20% that’s most strategic— and that can deliver 80% of the value.

4. Tell a story with your data

Once you’ve identified which KPIs matter most to your audience for a given dashboard, organize how you present these KPIs in a way that guides your audience as if you were telling a story. For example, if this quarter’s customer acquisition cost is a critical KPI, your dashboard design would emphasize that KPI and then, in smaller font, present data from prior quarters and breakouts for different acquisition channels. Ideally, you can also provide a summary and/or key takeaways from the data. Get inspired by the ten best modern  data visualization examples .

5. Choose the Right Types of Charts

It’s important to apply the right type of charts to represent your data. You should start by keeping in mind what information your audience needs to see. Here are the four primary chart types and recommendations on when to use them as you design your dashboard:

Comparison Charts

Use these simple visualizations to help users compare values over time, recognize trends, and identify high and low values. Common examples are bar charts, line charts and circular area charts. Time-based charts should represent time periods on the X axis and bar and line charts should ideally be limited to 7 data values.

Composition Charts

This type of data presentation helps users see parts of a whole, either over time or for a static period. Stacked area charts and stacked bar charts represent the changing relationship between data points over time. Pie charts show the relative difference between parts of a whole. Limiting how many data components you apply will make composition charts much easier to read.

Distribution Charts

This visualization type allows users to more easily see the shape or tendency of their data and quickly spot outliers and commonalities. Bar histograms, line histograms and scatter plots are common examples of distribution charts.

Relationship Charts

These visualizations help users see correlations and relationships in data. Scatter plots are effective for analyzing distribution and scatter plots with different bubble sizes adds a third data dimension

6. Apply Essential Dashboard UI Design Principles

Well-designed dashboards adhere to user interface (UI) design principles that guide an audience toward the information they need. The four principles below will help you transform messy data into well-informed decisions.

Organize the Information

When designing your dashboards, use classic UI design and information hierarchy principles to add clarity and guide your audience through the data. People usually scan horizontally across a page, and then down, so put the most important information at the top-left.

Keep it Simple

Busy business people need information and insights at a glance. Limit the number of charts and data points on the dashboard to avoid clutter and draw attention to key metrics by using color, font size and placement.

Provide Visual Cues

When designing for modern, interactive dashboards, use icons, buttons or text to indicate when an element links to another page or provides contextual information. Add clear calls to action if you want users to do something.

Get Color Right

First, make sure your dashboard design is consistent with your organization’s brand identity (colors, fonts, and graphics). Second, limit your use of color in general to keep your dashboard’s appearance open and light. Third, balance your use of color with the use of shapes and contrast.

7. Iterate and evolve

Before you roll out your dashboards to a large group, share them with a few users from the audience, listen to their feedback and make any revisions. Once you’ve rolled it out to the broader team, again ask for input and suggestions. Ideally, you could watch people actually using your dashboard. Plus, the KPIs most important to your audience now may change next month as the market changes, company strategy shifts, or new initiatives are launched.

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Benefits of best in class dashboard design

Following the best practices for dashboard design listed above helps your audience...

Transform data into business value

Most organizations have huge quantities of unorganized data. Well-designed dashboards help users know what data points to focus on and understand what the data means so they can make better business decisions.

Rally key stakeholders

Great dashboard design will help you make your case with decision makers across your organization and act quickly in response to changing needs. For example, visualizing market trends could help get executive approval on a new business venture.

Drive data literacy

Sharing dashboards of trustworthy and organized data throughout all levels of your organization fosters a  data-driven culture . Modern dashboards enable users to explore the data directly from within the dashboard which encourages employees at all levels to make discoveries and innovate.

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Visual best practices.

This content is part of Tableau Blueprint—a maturity framework allowing you to zoom in and improve how your organization uses data to drive impact. To begin your journey, take our assessment (Link opens in a new window) .

Visual best practices are key to developing informative visualizations that drive your audience to act. A dashboard is successful when people can easily use it to derive answers. Even a beautiful dashboard with an interesting data source could be rendered useless if your audience can’t use it to discover insights.

Think not just as an analyst but also as a designer and consumer. Dashboards should have interactive elements that are discoverable and predictable, follow a sensible, logical layout, and have a simplified design that makes complex decisions easier. It is important not to assume that people automatically know what it takes to clearly and effectively communicate with data. Here are a few whitepaper links to share on your enablement intranet:

• Visual analysis guidebook
• Which chart or graph is right for you?
• Good enough to great  
• Designing efficient workbooks

You can find a list of books by renowned data visualization experts in the appendix. Adding these whitepapers and books to the resources of your analytics community can lead to a deeper understanding and internalization of visual best practices.

The best visualizations have a clear purpose and work for their intended audience. It’s important to know what you are trying to say and who you are saying it to. Does your audience know this subject matter extremely well or will it be new to them? What kind of cues will they need? Thinking about these questions before you begin designing will help you create a successful dashboard. For example, you would present aggregated, summary-level data and KPIs to an executive audience rather than row-level transactions.

Make sure your views include context. Titles, captions, units, and commentary all help your audience to better understand your data view. Always strive to tell stories with your data and your visuals. Understand that good stories involve more than just data, and consider the following:

• Mind your aesthetics and know that what is effective is often affective. In other words, an effective view can create an emotional response and a genuine communication to your audience.
• Style is also important. Make sure that your views are consistent and pleasing to the eye. Your views are representative of who you are and what you care about.
• Dashboards that people can interact with are very engaging. Interactive elements allow your audience to manipulate the data, ask and answer questions, and arrive at findings on their own. This helps to foster trust in your data.
• Make your views vivid and memorable. Pay attention to structure and context.

Chart Choice

Chart choice should depend on the question you are trying to answer or a specific insight you are trying to communicate. There is almost always a trade-off involved, with different chart types each having their own advantages and downsides. You should always ask yourself if your chosen chart type best conveys the message you are trying to share and if it can be easily understood by your audience. The table below explains the chart types in Tableau’s Show Me panel and when to use each. This should be published to your enablement intranet to educate new users.

How your audience “reads” your dashboard is not a trivial consideration. Your dashboard’s purpose is to help guide the reader’s eye through multiple views in coordination and tell the story of each insight. Your dashboard needs a sensible “flow” and a logical layout of different pieces of information. The more you employ better dashboard design, your users will discover what’s happening, why, and what’s most important. Consider how you’re guiding their eyes across the dashboard. Are you showing the user where to look next?

Design theory gives us plenty of advice on how best to succeed. Layout is a key component of any successful dashboard design, here are a few concepts you want to think about when building visualizations:

• Newspaper or Z-layout — The most important content is put either at the top or the left of a visualization, as users move right and down for more specific content.
• White space — Using negative space (blank spots) and padding to delineate sections of your visualization – don’t use thick “grid lines” as you would see in a table.
• Size — More important pieces of content (KPIs, summary visualizations, etc.) should be larger than other items.
• Device type — With device-specific dashboards you can create the optimum viewing experience on desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone.

Color is one of the most powerful aesthetic features because it’s an attention-grabber. It’s the first thing we notice, and it can immediately highlight specific insights or identify outliers, but it is not an unlimited design resource.

Using color effectively is critical for producing quality data visualizations – color types (alerting vs highlighting), creating custom color palettes, and consistency—are key aspects to build into your standards.

The correct use of color is critical for producing coherent and impactful data stories. The key factors that should be taken in to consideration for any successful dashboard are:

• Managing color choices — The primary color(s) that make up most of your design should be a neutral color. Using techniques like grayscale, you maximize the possibility for contrast and visibility of your data driven points. Your extended colors—accents, emphasis, and alerts—should reflect the brand. Any extended color should be used sparingly to draw attention to key messages within the data.
• Color types — Understand when to use sequential, diverging, categorical, highlighting, or alerting color motifs.
• Custom color palettes — Build your own company palettes to bring a sense of uniformity and provide guiderails for new users.
• Consistency — Double-check your visualizations to make sure a color (e.g. red) does not mean three different things. Similar and repeated colors can imply a relation where one doesn’t exist.
• Accessibility — Remember to account for color blindness in the design process.

Titles & Subtitles

Titles are an easy way to make your dashboard more digestible for your audience. You add more context with subtitles that describe how to interact with the worksheet or dashboard. This is a powerful and simple way to make dashboards easier to navigate. In the example below, the question pulls the audience in and then tells the audience how to answer the question using the dashboard.

Effective Title and Subtitle

Similarly, by changing your filter title to something more intuitive, you guide viewers through how to interact with a dashboard.

Example of a Filter

Tooltips guide the audience by highlighting important information. In the example below, the County and State are highlighted through a bold effect and color change, and we don’t have to partition our scatter plot further. We add important and related dimensions and measures in the tooltip. This helps save space and declutter the dashboard so our viewers can focus on gleaning insights instead of interpreting the visualization.

Effective Tooltip

If the viewer notices something interesting in the tooltip, they can interact directly with the tooltip and watch the rest of the visualization come to life, highlighting related marks and outliers.

Formatting a Tooltip

Typography is important. It can be tempting to use many font types and sizes in a dashboard. Don’t do that; instead, define a clear hierarchy for your typography. In the example below, there is a top, mid, and low-level font. The mid-level is blue to focus viewer attention. Color draws the eye to the most important level (which needn’t necessarily be the top-level font).

Top, Mid, and Low-Level Fonts (Courtesy of The Big Book of Dashboards)

Make sure that font selection is done to reinforce a visual hierarchy within your visualization through size, boldness, color and type.

• Size — Larger elements convey importance as they catch the eye.  Save your largest fonts for KPIs, titles, etc.
• Boldness — Bolder elements convey importance as they catch the eye. You can vary boldness throughout your visualization in conjunction with size. For example, your title and KPIs could both be 24pt font, but making your KPIs bold will “pop” them, allowing your audience to focus there first.
• Color — Generally it’s good to stick with gray and black hues in your titles, text, and KPIs. You can “pop” your KPIs by giving them a color treatment, but you have to balance this with the other colors used in your visualization. Darker colors will draw the eye, so it’s wise to lighten your titles so they don’t compete for visual attention.

Dashboard Size

By default, Tableau dashboards are set to use a fixed size. If you keep this setting, be sure to construct your visualization at the size which it will be viewed. You can also set Size to Automatic, so Tableau automatically adapts the overall dimensions of a visualization based on screen size. This means that if you design a dashboard at 1300 x 700 pixels, Tableau will resize it for smaller displays—and sometimes this results in scrunched views or scrollbars. The Range sizing feature is helpful for avoiding this.

Dashboard Size Range

If you're using Tableau Desktop to create dashboards, you can also design for specific device layouts, so that on tablets, for example, your dashboard contains one set of views and objects, and on phones it displays another. See Create Dashboard Layouts for Different Device Types for steps.

Dashboard Interactivity

When designing a dashboard, you need to consider your audience, and how you can communicate to them that they can interact with the dashboard. Skilled users know to click and experiment, but new users may not have the knowledge or confidence. Your job is to help them make these decisions consciously, not by accident.

It’s important to make any interactivity obvious to your audience—even by creating subtitles to instruct them to click or hover for more information. Add interactivity to your data using filters, tooltips, and actions . Filters are the most obvious way to interact with a dashboard. Users can also interact with your visualizations by selecting marks and hovering to see tooltips. The actions you set up can respond with navigation and changes in the view. The table below enumerates the ways to create interactivity in your dashboards.

When designing dashboards, consider how and why you incorporate interactivity into the dashboard. The following questions are helpful:

• Why does a viewer need to interact with the dashboard?
• What extras insight will be gained through the interactivity?

Designing for Performance

When we talk about performance , we mean the speed with which you can work in Tableau. That might mean the speed of data analysis—for example, if you work in Tableau Desktop on a large corporate database that takes forever in real time when you access it remotely. Or it might mean simply the speed of loading views or dashboards that you access on your desktop or from Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud.

Performance and efficiency should be treated as part of the design process—not as an afterthought. Responsiveness is an important success factor for end users when viewing reports and dashboards, so making your workbooks run as quickly as possible makes for happier users.

There are several factors that make a workbook “efficient”. Some of these factors are technical and some more user-focused but in general an efficient workbook is:

• Simple — Is it easy to create the workbook and will it be easy to maintain in the future? Does it take advantage of the principles of visual analysis to clearly communicate the message of the author and the data?
• Flexible — Can the workbook answer multiple questions the users want to ask, or just one? Does it engage the user in an interactive experience or is it simply a static report?
• Fast — Does the workbook respond quickly enough for the users? This may mean time to open, time to refresh, or time to respond to interaction. This is a subjective measure, but in general we want workbooks to provide an initial display of information and to respond to user interactions within seconds.

The performance of a dashboard is impacted by the following:

• The visual design at both the dashboard and worksheet levels, e.g. how many elements, how many data points, use of filters and actions, etc.
• The calculations, e.g. what kind of calculation, where the calculation is performed, etc.
• The queries, e.g. how much data is returned, impact of custom SQL, etc.
• The data connections and underlying data sources.
• Some differences between Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud.
• Other environmental factors, such as hardware configuration and capacity for Tableau Server.

For more information, see Designing Efficient Workbooks .

Accessibility

To make your views accessible to as many people as possible—or if you work in an environment that is subject to US Section 508 requirements or other accessibility-related laws and regulations—you can use Tableau to build data views that conform to the Web Content Accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.0 AA). This includes building views that are accessible to users who use screen readers, braille keyboards, keyboard-only navigation, and so on. Refer to Build Data Views for Accessibility for details. Additional resources are available on the “FAQ: Accessibility” post in the Tableau Community forums.