Dashboard design tips
A dashboard is not a collection of every chart you can build. It answers a small set of questions at a glance and lets the reader dig deeper only if they want to. Design is what separates a report that gets opened daily from one that gets opened once.
Start with the question
Write the page's question on paper first: "How are our five stores performing against target this month?" Every visual on the page must help answer it. Anything that does not belongs on another page or in a drill-through.
Layout: follow the eye
Readers scan from the top left. Put the headline KPIs there, supporting trends in the middle, and detail at the bottom or behind a drill-through.
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Sales YTD | GM % | Orders | AOV <- KPI cards |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Monthly trend (line) | Sales by city (bar) |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Product detail table | Slicers: month, |
| | region, category |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
Keep to six to eight visuals per page. Align edges, use the same padding everywhere and turn on View, Gridlines and Snap to grid.
Pick the visual that matches the message
| Message | Visual |
|---|---|
| Single number vs target | Card or KPI |
| Change over time | Line chart (dates on the x-axis) |
| Compare categories | Horizontal bar, sorted by value |
| Part of a whole | Stacked bar or a single donut, never several pies |
| Relationship | Scatter chart |
| Row-level detail | Table or matrix, with conditional formatting |
Sort bar charts by value, not alphabetically; ranking is usually the point. Avoid 3-D effects, gauges crowded onto a page and dual-axis charts, which readers routinely misread.
Colour with intent
Use one accent colour for the metric in focus and grey for context. Add colour only when it carries meaning, such as red for below target and green for above. Check the report in View, Show as colour-blind friendly and never rely on colour alone: add an arrow, a sign or a label.
Interactivity
- Slicers for month, region and category, placed consistently in the same spot on every page.
- Drill-through from a city to that city's product detail page.
- Tooltips built as a small report page to show a mini trend on hover.
- Edit interactions to stop a slicer or visual from filtering something it should not.
- Bookmarks plus buttons for a "Last year vs this year" toggle.
Keep it fast
A slow dashboard is an unused dashboard. Import mode rather than DirectQuery where possible, a narrow star-schema model, measures instead of visual-level calculations, fewer visuals per page, and no unnecessary high-cardinality columns such as invoice numbers in a slicer.
Common mistakes
- Cramming twenty visuals on one page because they were all "requested".
- Titles like "Sum of Amount by City"; write "Sales by city, FY 2026-27".
- No units or currency format, so readers cannot tell lakhs from crores.
- Building for a big monitor when half the audience opens it on a phone; set up the mobile layout.
Practice
Take an existing report page and rebuild it to one question. Reduce it to at most seven visuals, add four KPI cards across the top, sort the bar chart by value, grey out everything except the focus metric, and add a drill-through page for city-level detail.