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What is a dashboard?
A dashboard is a single surface showing several views of live data, arranged to be glanced at rather than read. The two words doing the work are live — it reads the data rather than holding a copy — and glanced — if it needs studying, it is a report, and reports are better as documents.
Dashboard, report, analysis
- A dashboard answers "is anything off right now". Live, few numbers, no narrative.
- A report answers "what happened last month, and what we did about it". Periodic, with words in it.
- An analysis answers one question once, in depth, and is then finished.
Most things called dashboards are reports that update, which is fine — but it explains why so many of them are ignored: they are built to be studied and then placed where nobody studies anything.
The three failure modes
- Too many tiles. If everything is on it, nothing is signal. A dashboard that cannot be read in ten seconds is not doing its job.
- No comparison. A number alone is not information. Against last month, against target, against last year — pick one and put it next to the number.
- Stale without saying so. The most dangerous dashboard is one that looks live and is not. Put the last-refreshed time on it.
And the honest case against
If a number is checked once a month, an email with four lines in it beats a dashboard nobody opens. Build the dashboard when the checking is frequent enough that the surface pays for itself — and when it is not, write the four lines.
Building one
Every spreadsheet program and every BI tool can draw one; the hard part is the table underneath. When the numbers are assembled each month from several exports, make that assembly repeatable before you build anything on top — a dashboard over a hand-made table is only as current as the last time somebody made it.
TableDI 2 is a desktop app for file work you redo every period: it keeps your sources, rules and delivery as a job, so next month you drop in the new files and run it again. Everything runs on your own machine. It does not draw dashboards: it prepares the table a dashboard reads and hands it over as an Excel or CSV file.
Questions people ask
What is the difference between a dashboard and a report?
A dashboard is live and built to be glanced at; a report is periodic and built to be read, usually with a narrative. Confusing the two is why many dashboards go unopened.
How many charts should a dashboard have?
Few enough to read in about ten seconds. If it needs studying, the content wants to be a report instead.
Do I need a BI tool to build one?
No. A spreadsheet with a pivot and a chart or two covers the majority of real dashboards. BI tools earn their cost when many people need governed access to the same definitions.
Related
Doing this every month?
In TableDI 2 you do it once, then save it as a job. Next month you drop in the new files and run it again.
macOS, Apple silicon and Intel; Windows is in progress (what to do meanwhile). Free is not a trial — no account, no card.
Last reviewed 2026-09-11 by the TableDI team. Something wrong on this page? Tell us — it is one inbox, read by the people who build TableDI.