Data grids are perfect for data analysis. In the last section's video, we discussed the best practice to end the chain of drill-downs with a data grid as users go from high-level summarized data into the details of data.
In this section, we show you the various methods of summarizing data in DashboardFox.
What is a summarized report?
Think of a summarized report as taking a data set and applying an aggregate formula in order to summarize or describe data across one or more dimensions.
Aggregate formulas include things such as count (how many occurrences of X), average (average value of X), sum (adding up all the instances of X) and then looking at that number across one or more dimensions.
Summarized data is how we best interpret data, by looking at the patterns.
Summarized reports answer questions such as:
- How many help desk tickets did I have per month this year? By category? By priority? By customer?
- What was my total sales this quarter? By location? By product? By sales rep?
- How many widgets did we produce in the past 30 days? With defects? Average time to ship?
- How can I summarize data in DashboardFox?
There are a few ways to create summarized reports in DashboardFox, they include:
- The most common method (and most powerful) is applying the out-of-the-box aggregate functions as a formula to a data grid in DashboardFox.
- You may already have a database with summarized data, in which case you simply need to build a data grid from those database tables.
- You can take a raw dataset in DashboardFox and use our Advanced Pivot Grid visualization to summarize data across multiple dimensions
- You can use the basic pivot grid to summarize data across 2 dimensions
In this video, we are going to walk you through the various options of how to take the data grid we created in the last section and start to convert it into data that answers the meaningful questions in your business.