For those of you who’ve been with us for a while now, you know that we update our platform every month with a lot of performance improvements and new features. Our job is to make sure you have every tool and features you need to turn your data into actionable insights and to make better business decisions.
Once a year, we also like to take a step back and review all of the cool new features we’ve introduced over the past year, highlighting the ones our customers use most and like most. In this post, our focus is on dashboard features. In our next post, we’ll share with you our shortlist of most-used/most-liked data management and processing features.
First, let’s review what ClicData is:
What is ClicData?
ClicData is a 100% cloud-based business intelligence platform that allows you to connect, store, manage, visualize, and share your data intuitively, quickly, and powerfully. With easy-to-set-up, intelligent dashboards, you and your teams stay informed and make the best possible business decisions based on real-time data.
Access ALL of your business data
ClicData connects to all of your business applications and databases. So, you can access all of your business data—from marketing, CRM, financial, e-commerce, production, logistics, and other systems in your IT stack—into your ClicData account and benefit from the holistic and aggregated insights all of your data offers you. But since it’s all cloud-based, there’s no worry or cost about additional hardware or systems maintenance.
Interactive dashboards
This is what brought you here, right? Yes, with ClicData, you can build interactive and meaningful dashboards with over 70 data visualization options that we call “widgets.” They allow you to glean the meaning of your data extremely quickly and intuitively. Choose from all kinds of tables, interactive and custom maps, line-, bullet-, pie-, bar-, and area-charts, gauges, number indicators, and more. We have them all.
Data warehouse & ETL features
ClicData includes a built-in cloud-based data warehouse in which you can easily store, manage, secure, and share your datasets with your teams. Its ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) features allow you to prep your data for reports, so you get insights that are reliable and accurate for on-target decision-making. ETL features include cleansing, merge, fuse, normalize, and/or create joint datasets. See ClicData’s ETL tools.
Automatically refresh the data you access
Now that you have access to your data from anywhere in your organization, you can automate your data refreshes however frequently you want to—up to the minute. The dashboards you set up will get automatically updated with your latest data, giving everyone in your team the same level of information simultaneously.
Real-time collaboration
ClicData also allows you to automate delivery of your dashboards and reports via email or as PDF exports. But the best option—and most popular—is sharing dashboards with live links. With a simple link, you and your teammates can access your company’s latest data and KPIs at any given time, from any device, anywhere. Talk about efficient!
Top 6 Features to Build Awesome Dashboards
Our product specialists collect and analyze our customer feedback—sometimes hundreds per day! Here are the five dashboard features our customers love most:
1. Pivot Tables to Analyze and Organize
Our Pivot Table widget is one of our most-loved widgets. Pivot tables are typically used to display sales and financial data based on two attributes in a dataset. For example, if you are examining the number of sales per country by car type for a car dealership, a pivot table will do an effective job by transposing attribute groups as row and column headings. Here’s an example of such a pivot table:
While this is a somewhat simple example of a pivot table, ClicData doesn’t limit you. You can build highly complex tables with millions of rows of data if you want to!
2. Heatmaps to See What’s Hot
The heatmap is a new favorite among our customers. It is a color-coding capability that lets you quickly and intuitively compare the relative values of your data. For example, you can highlight the highest and lowest values in your table and compare values that fall between them.
3. Zoom—Dive Deep into your Charts
Our Zoom feature has been available for a while now, but it is one of the most wanted must-haves in dashboard software. Why? You might have a lot of data represented in your charts, whether because you’re tracking years of data or because you’re comparing different metrics in a single chart. With this feature, you can zoom in and out on every chart of your dashboard to get a closer look at your data. For example, take a look at the Daily Sales KPIs chart below:
This dashboard might be hard to read at first glance. Of course, you can filter the data within a time period of your choice—the previous month, the last three months, the last six months, year-to-date, for example. But even if you’re just looking at last week’s data, you can zoom in further to get a closer look at your sales stats.
On this hotel’s Sales KPI dashboard, for example, there’s also a line chart comparing the revenue generated by room reservations, food and beverages, and other sources.
This chart offers a quick overview of hotel revenue distribution over the month of January. But what if the hotel owner wants to know what happened last week so they can improve performance next week? By zooming in on the chart of that specific week, you get a closer look at the detail within the data:
When you’re done, it’s fast and easy to return to your previous view by clicking “Reset Zoom”.
What’s the difference between zooming and drilling down?
ClicData also offers a Drill Down feature, which is similar to Zoom, but different. The difference is that the Zoom feature allows you to dive into your chart and visualize a smaller volume of data. The Drill Down feature, on the other hand, lets you open the detailed view of your raw data when you double-click on an element of your chart. See it in action here:
4. Global Filter Control
Our customers literally rave about our global filter feature. Why? One of the most important principles to follow when designing a dashboard is to keep it simple in order to keep your audience engaged with it. That means that having too many filters will make your dashboard more complex—and less usable.
Our Global Filter allows you to avoid this issue by filtering multiple dashboard widgets in one go. In other words, you can manage, edit, and delete filters on numerous widgets at the same time. It’s a HUGE time saver!
5. Conditional Widget Visibility
You’re always in control of your data with ClicData! This feature lets you toggle widgets between being visible and invisible based on the conditions you set. This can come in very handy! For example, you can hide and unhide the filters on your dashboard to drive your end-users focus to your KPIs and your data. Or, base the visibility of a text box on an input switch.
Take the Retailer Sales Performance dashboard example shown below. It looks relatively simple and standard, but it has a lot of filters in use behind the scenes that could make it too challenging and time-consuming to read and understand.
When you click the “Filters” button (top right), you can filter by city, store, and brand, as shown here:
But the Filters button is actually an input widget with conditional visibility, so the data results of the provided filters will appear and disappear from the dashboard according to your preferences.
You can also use the conditional visibility feature when you want to display two KPIs in a single spot on your dashboard. For example, you might want to quickly see your monthly sales and compare your results against your goals. Do that easily with a button that lets you toggle between displaying one KPI or the other.
Learn how to switch visibility with an input button widget.
6. Customized User Parameters
Consultants and agencies love this feature! As they can attest, building, and maintaining a dashboard for every single customer is time-consuming and can hurt your business. With our Custom User Parameters feature, you can set up a single dashboard, but manage all of your customer’s KPIs and set user parameters so that they can only see their own data. Keep your customers’ data confidential and safe while making your dashboard maintenance a lot easier.
The feature is also a great feature for your company’s internal purposes. Let’s say you are selling cars for both personal and professional use and that you have a dedicated sales team for each product category.
You can build a single dashboard with all your sales data by product and region and grant your sales reps access to their stats only. In the dashboard below, for example, you can easily restrict access to data by region, segment, or sales rep.
Bonus Feature—Because It’s Cool, too!
We couldn’t just stop at six features, so we thought we’d throw another cool feature that can elevate your data visualization game!
7. Customize Your Dashboard with CSS
With these built-in features in the ClicData platform, you can build awesome interactive dashboards for your organization and your customers. But you can even take the power and productivity a step further with custom HTML/CSS code.
You are pretty much only limited to your imagination! For more detail, read our blog post to learn how to build custom dashboards with some CSS code.
Check this –very cool– dashboard example that one of our product ninjas built with effects you apply to your dashboard by copying and pasting the code snippets into the “Custom CSS” properties of your dashboard.
You can do so much with ClicData’s Dashboard Designer’s features. To learn more, schedule a screen-sharing session with one of our product specialists. They will walk you through ClicData’s rich set of capabilities and help you get the most of your data. Or you can try them out yourself by opening a free trial account.
Happy dashboarding!
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