5.10 Create an interactive dashboard - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v Instructor>All right, so we are going to round out</v> the lesson on authoring interactive reports by creating an interactive dashboard in this particular sub lesson. So what we're gonna do here is we wanna show how we can interact with this dashboard and have all the different visuals react to filters that we're gonna place in certain locations. So in particular, we're going to do a timeline and we're gonna set up some slicers. So let's go ahead and do that. So what we'll do, first is we're going to click on one of our pivot charts and what I do is go up into my pivot chart, Analyze tab. And what I'm gonna do is click on Insert Slicer. So I'm just gonna do this and what it's gonna do is ask me, what do I actually want to put that slicer on? So I'm gonna choose the Sales Territory. So it's gonna choose Sales Territory as a slice like so, and it's going to drop a slicer on my canvas, like so, and I'm just gonna go ahead and move that over to here and space so that just a little bit more like this, just to kind of get it all set up and we're going to do some further formatting on this particular slice here momentarily. So first off, I'm just gonna give the slicer a little bit more real estate debris here. So I'm just going to insert some rows here so that I can go ahead and drag this and make it just a little bit bigger. So we can show a few more tiles in there with the slicer still highlighted. I'm just gonna go over here and I'm gonna say that I want to maybe include a couple of columns and this I'm just gonna go over to the Slicer tab under the buttons group, the very top we have columns and it was gonna go and maybe put four in there so I can see all of the different options we have in your five gets a little too scrubbed. So four seems just about right, for that particular slicer. And what we can see here is given that I initiated the creation of the slicer from this particular visual here. This will be the only visual response to changes from the slicer. So I'm gonna choose Australia and watch only the first visual changes. And we'll see here that we've got Australia as a sales territory, because that's what I've chosen up here. We can choose Canada. Now we see that Canada has been chosen. I can actually choose multiples here. So the way to choose multiples by using the control key. And now I've got Australia and Canada chosen on the visualizations. So if I didn't want to hit the Control key as I was choosing multiples, I could click on this little icon right here. It is called the multi-select. So once I click on that, we'll see it turns on. And now, instead of hitting the control key, I can just go and choose as many of these as I want. If I want to turn it off, I just have to click it again and turn it off like so. Okay, so that is going ahead and putting the slicer into the table, but now maybe I'll wanna make this slice right here, affect these other pivot charts. So we're going to show you how to go about doing that by going, ensure the slicer has been chosen under the Slicer tab, we go over to the left-hand side here and it says slicer and we wanna choose Report Connections. So we click on this and what it's doing here is it's listing out the pivot tables that we have created. So this is where having good naming conventions of behind your pivot tables will really help things a little offline because now I can go through this list of pivot tables here and ultimately at the end of the day, I'm going to choose them all anyhow. But if I had a lot of pivot tables and I was trying to decide how to mix and match my report connections, it would be much more apparent with good naming conventions. So now what I've done is I've hopped it up so this slice right here is gonna impact the, this pivot chart right here. This picture right here and this one. So all three are gonna be impacted by this. So I'm gonna go ahead and click, Okay. And you'll notice that all these pivot charts changed. So this one stayed the same, 'cause we were originally navigating with it. But over here, these pivot charts changed. So now if I go and choose central, we'll notice that these ones react as well, add France into the mix and now everything is just reacting to what I have here in the slicer. So let's going ahead and setting the slicer up. So now next let's go and get ourselves a timeline set. So once again, I'm gonna choose on the Total Order Quantity by a sales territory here, go up to pivot chart, analyze. I'm gonna say insert Timeline. And the timeline requires that we have a column in here that is of the, that has dates in it. So I'm gonna choose the order date, like so, and we'll see a timeline shows up, which I'm going to put right in here, ish, like so let's get rid of out there and then just resize the timeline like that there. And now I've got a timeline for all of my data. Once again, this is only impacting this first chart right here. So the way that I go ahead and change this to impact all charts is basically the same way I did it back in the slicer. Click on Report Connections and go in and choose the pivot tables we wanna connect this into. So now we can see that these have all been impacted and I can choose individual months like I'm doing here. I can actually drag on this slider and choose multiple months, like just right here, if I want, I can actually change the scale this to years. So I can in the actual timeline, choose years, and now, I go and choose individual years like that. That's the entire dataset, go down to quarters, months or even down to the day. Or else I can play around with these in any way that I want. So I'm just gonna go back down to my month here and let's go ahead and choose April and choose May all the way back down to not April, I guess (mumbles). From may all the way to the end of July. And now this is what our data set looks like. So we can give ourselves a little bit more real estate here now that we've got things set the way we want, we can just double click on our Menu up here. And now I've got a little bit more space for my dashboard and now I can actually start interacting with it at this level. So one of the really nice things about the slicers and timelines is you can make them affect multiple pivot tables and what's gonna keeping them on your pivot tables is associated with the pivot table underneath. So we do go about impacting both at the exact same time, and that is different than I'm just going to go over to my Pivot Table tab here from before and that is different than going over to the actual pivot table itself and just go ahead and get the field to set back up here and taking advantage of the filters that are at the pivot table level, because these filters right here can only apply to one and only one pivot table. Whereas if we take common filtering that we wanna apply across all of our pivot tables slash pivot charts, we can move them out of the filters pane here and build them into slices and timelines. And then we can create more interactive visualizations and dashboards. All right, so that brings us to the end of this particular sub lesson.