1. Creating dashboards and stories
In this lesson you will learn how to create your first dashboard and first story.
We will do so by using four different visualizations about Nintendo. The first sheet contains an area chart of video games sales for Nintendo by release year. The second visualization contains info on the amount of sales per platform such as the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance. The third visualization contains a treemap with information about the genre, while the last sheet ranks the top sold video games. This is a lot of information, and it would be a lot easier to see this all in one overview, which is where dashboards come in!
We click the new dashboard button (next to new worksheet) after which we get an empty sheet. Let's rename it to Nintendo. We have space for the actual dashboard in the middle, and a pane with different options on the left. The main part of this pane is the sheets sections, which shows the worksheets present in the workbook.
We drag the first sheet to the canvas for it to appear. Consecutively, we drag the second sheet to the right. Notice this gray overlay, which is where the released dashboard will appear. Let's drag the other two visualizations in so they appear at the bottom. A legend and a filter appeared when we dragged in Top Video Games. This happened automatically because the legend and filter were shown on the worksheet.
Let’s place the filter at the top. On the right side of the legend is a more options arrow to reveal a dropdown menu with different options. In this case we select floating, after which the legend can be moved around freely.
If we type in Pokemon in the name filter, the whole dashboard adapts. We see that the sales on the Wii dropped dramatically and that the best selling pokemon game is Pokemon Red and Blue. This interactive element is where the power of dashboards come in, and it can become even more powerful by using visualizations as filters. Let’s remove Pokemon again. Navigate to the tree map and select "Use as filter" by clicking this funnel icon. If we now click on for example the Simulation genre, we notice that Nintendogs is the most sold video game within this genre. If we click on the simulation genre again, the filter gets removed.
A similar dashboard for Playstation and Xbox has already been setup, so let's combine the three to create our first story. We click the new story icon and rename the story to "Competitor Analysis 1994 - 2010". We could drag a sheet to the story, but double-clicking will also add it. Let's rename the tabs to Playstation, Xbox, and Nintendo. There we have it - we just built an interactive dashboard and combined them with 2 other dashboards to create our first story!
At the end of this chapter you will be able to create a very similar story. Don't worry if it looks overwhelming, you won't have to build everything from scratch and we'll guide you along the way! Have fun!
2. Let's practice!