A Dashboard is an analysis like any other analysis in the TARGIT Decision Suite. However, it is an analysis that has been designed to give a very high-level overview of your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
Some object types are better at showing high-level information than others, and quite often, you will see the gauge object type being used in dashboard analyses.
Start with a basic crosstab
Even though you can create a gauge on top of a very complex crosstab, it is rarely necessary to do so. If the gauge is supposed to show three KPIs – then, why not let the basic crosstab reflect the same simplicity?
The shown simple crosstab is based on the Revenue measure and a comparison of LYTD and YTD:
The Growth Percent calculation comes from the list of predefined calculations.
Furthermore, three color agents have been added to the calculation:
The blue color agent have been selected carefully to match the gauge object we are going to apply in a minute:
As we are going to create a complete Dashboard with these KPIs – one gauge per Product Group – we will need to add Local Criteria to each object:
Gauge Properties
At this point, we may change the crosstab to a Gauge object type, and open the Gauge Properties dialogue box.
The Gauge Properties dialogue box has three tabs on the left hand side: General, Scale & Labels and Values.
General
The first thing to do is to select the proper visualization type, in this case the Icon – Sq Banner Blue Selected.
Values
Next, we should jump to the Values tab. Initially, we can only see the last value from the crosstab, the Growth Percent. While this is one of the KPIs we would like to see in the gauge, we would also like to see the Revenue values of YTD and LYTD.
Click the ‘+’ button twice to add Revenue twice.
Notice: To make the Revenue value show YTD and LYTD respectively, we will need to adjust column reference for one of the entries: “2 columns from the right”.
Scale and Labels
Now, let us turn the attention to the Scale & Label tab. At this point, ignore the Minimum and Maximum settings.
The selected gauge visualization has been designed to hold seven separate values – as can be seen from the small preview on the left hand side of the Gauge Properties dialogue box.
These seven values corresponds to the seven Labels entries on the Scale & Labels tab – from Header 01 and down to Value 03 Label.
Make sure that the Value 02 and Value 03 reflects the two YTD and LYTD values of Revenue.
To make text appear in the places where we are currently seeing “27.94”, we will have to tweak the number format a bit.
To access number format for Header 01, click the hash mark:
For this gauge, due to the JEANS local criteria, we would like the header to be “JEANS”:
Notice: The double syntax of “JEANS”;”JEANS” is necessary to avoid undesired minus signs in front of this text.
Likewise, we can change number formatting of Value 01 Label, Value 02 Label and Value 03 Label to display the text we would like to see:
Notice: It really does not matter what value has been selected for these labels as they are going to be overwritten by pure text anyway.
Now, by copying the gauge and modifying the local criteria and the Header text, we can get a complete dashboard like this:
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