Telling Data, Reports and Dashboards Apart

When you step into the working world, one of the things you will keep hearing about is the terms data, report and dashboard. These usually have to do with what people call reporting.

The bigger the company, the more data it has, and naturally the more reports there will be too. From sales, marketing, finance, employee performance and so on.

If you have just started working and you are handed the task of making a report, then you really should know how to tell apart what data, a report and a dashboard are.

Data

If we use a food analogy, then data is like the ingredients we are about to cook with. Data can take the form of numbers in an Excel table or spreadsheet. Usually these numbers have not been processed yet, no conclusions have been drawn, they have no meaning yet. Just the numbers.

Example of data: a spreadsheet containing thousands of rows of customers, transaction values, products purchased. That spreadsheet file or table is just data.

Report

When that spreadsheet data is processed and we draw insights from it, only then is it called a report. For example: “In June, sales of product A increased by 20% compared to July.”

Or another example: “Customer Badu is the customer who shops most frequently in a single month; he shopped 5 times.”

In other words, from thousands of rows of data, we can extract a few pieces of important and relevant information or insight. This report is then usually used to make decisions within the company.

Dashboard

Unlike Data and a Report, a Dashboard is something more visual. A dashboard is something that displays the relevant data in the form of charts and is more interactive.

On top of that, the way a dashboard presents data is usually more up to date; the data it shows changes as its source data changes.

And a dashboard is interactive, because it has all sorts of buttons for filtering, sorting and so on that help us find the data we are looking for.

In food terms, a Dashboard is like eating nasi padang, but served the hidang way. You can choose for yourself which dish you want to eat, which gravy, and add the various sambal options to your taste.

Tools

There are many tools you can use to build a dashboard. You can use PowerBI from Microsoft. Google has Looker Studio, which connects to various data sources from Google’s services. And there are still many other tools you can learn.

And one of the powerful things about a Dashboard built with this technology is automation. In Looker Studio, for example, you can send reports automatically to email on a schedule you set, whether daily, weekly, monthly or on a specific date.