written by
5000fish Team

Introducing a New DashboardFox Visualization: Aggregate Grid

BI Problems and Solutions 5 min read
DashboardFox - Self-Service BI Tool

Business intelligence (BI) reporting is all about distilling and deciphering data to uncover valuable insights that can steer better decision-making and boost business performance. The effectiveness of this process hinges on utilizing the right tools and techniques.

When it comes to data analysis, DashboardFox shines with its suite of features tailored for clarity and impact. Let’s delve into what makes DashboardFox a game-changer in BI reporting.

Data Aggregation Simplified

Data aggregation is all about turning lots of detailed information into easy-to-understand summaries. With DashboardFox, you don't have to wade through row after row of complicated data. Instead, it gives you the key points and patterns that really matter for making smart business choices.

Imagine you have tons of information about who's voting in an election and you want to know the big picture, like how many people voted in each county. DashboardFox can quickly take all those details and boil them down to just the numbers you need, making it super simple to see and understand the overall voting trends.

With tools like these, DashboardFox ensures that you spend less time getting lost in data and more time getting insights that can help your business.

Effective Data Grouping

Data grouping is like sorting your laundry—it's about putting similar things together to make sense of a big pile. With DashboardFox, this becomes a breeze. You can quickly sort data—like numbers from a survey or sales figures—into categories that show you what's going on. It makes spotting trends or things that stand out super easy.

For example, if you have a bunch of sales numbers, you can use DashboardFox to organize them by region. It's almost like coloring in a map where each color shows how much you sold in different places. This way, it's clear to see which areas are doing great and which might need a little extra help.

Grid Reports for High-Level Analysis

Think of grid reports in DashboardFox as a super-organized spreadsheet that can connect to all kinds of data sources. They're like customizable charts where you can move columns around, set filters, and arrange your data however you want, all to make sense of it at a glance. This setup is perfect for when you need to step back and see the big picture in your business.

Let's say you have a store and want to track sales. DashboardFox's grid reports can display everything from what’s selling best to where it's selling and in what color, all in a neat and tidy table. This helps you easily spot what products are hot sellers and where you’re making the most money, giving you the clues you need to make smart decisions.

Pattern Spotting Made Simple

Beyond just organizing data, DashboardFox's grid reports are excellent at helping you find patterns. Imagine you're trying to solve a mystery, and you have all these clues on a board. DashboardFox is like that detective's board, but for your business.

It shows you if certain items sell better at certain times of the year, or if one region always buys more than another. Being able to see these patterns helps you plan better for the future, whether that means stocking up for the busy season or giving a little extra push where sales are slow.

Implementing Best Practices

Beyond its robust features, DashboardFox encourages best practices that cater to your audience's needs and ensure data clarity:

  • Tailor to Your Audience: Understand their unique needs and identify the KPIs that will guide your analysis.
  • Prepare Your Data: Leverage data replication and transformation to standardize and clean your data.
  • Stay Flexible: Adapt to new technologies and maintain scalable architecture for secure, multi-device access.
  • Govern Your Data: Implement permissions to protect sensitive information according to governance rules.
  • Narrate with Data: Craft engaging stories using visual dashboards that emphasize key insights.
  • Champion Data Literacy: Invest in training to build a data-driven culture and enhance BI report usage.

Understanding and implementing these best practices with DashboardFox is essential because they help transform raw data into meaningful stories that are clear and relevant to your team.

By focusing on user-specific needs, ensuring data quality, embracing flexibility, securing sensitive information, and fostering data literacy, you empower your team to make informed decisions effectively.

This approach not only maximizes the potential of your BI tools but also aligns your entire organization with a culture that values and utilizes data to its fullest potential.

Introducing the Aggregate Grid: DashboardFox’s Latest Feature You Should Try

With DashboardFox’s latest innovation, the Aggregate Grid, users now have a powerful tool at their disposal. This feature accelerates the creation of grid-style reports, offering an intuitive interface for selecting, ordering, and formatting columns.

The Aggregate Grid goes beyond the basics with advanced sorting, filtering, and group-based aggregates such as sum and count. New functionalities also include conditional row shading for immediate visual cues on data thresholds.

Quickly create a grid style report by dragging and dropping fields into the DashboardFox Aggregate Grid builder. Users can select and order the columns, and select the display format to ensure dates, numbers, and currency display as desired.

With the standard grid, users have the ability to sort and filter columns, drag and drop to create grouping, and quickly export to excel.

Grid display in DashboardFox

Users can also designate groupings of data and configure the initial display to be grouped or expanded as shown in the example below.

Grouped grid display in DashboardFox

To add additional power, aggregates such as sum, count, min, max, and average can be applied to any column of data as appropriate and the display of the values can be at the group row, within the group, as a grand total, and with custom labels.

Grouped grid with aggregates at DashboardFox

And a new feature recently added is to allow row shading based on the comparison of columns in the grid or by a custom value. In the below example, a rule was set to display any total less than $400 as yellow.

Conditional row formatting in aggregate grid

To witness firsthand how DashboardFox can revolutionize your BI reporting, we invite you to schedule a meeting with our experts or join one of our free live demo sessions. It's time to streamline your data management with DashboardFox’s advanced, user-friendly solutions.

data aggregation Data Visualization DashboardFox grid reports