The Big Book of Dashboards: Visualizing Your Data Using Real-World Business Scenarios

This book is a must have for many data visualization specialists, particularly if you use Tableau. In general I was very happy with this book. The selected dashboards that were presented were good representations of what can be needed in different situations. The accompanying explanations helped make sense why decisions were appropriate, or what might be improved. The quality of the color print made the illustrations easy on the eyes and there wasn't guesswork about what was being included in a dashboard or what color combination was involved. My only criticism was that the layout could have been improved- text would frequently reference a screenshot that wasn't visible until the page was turned.

I just got mine in the mail and certainly have not read it, but I've skimmed every page. From a CFO's perspective, love it! Just a couple more observations which one reviewer has already addressed: 1. You don't read this book. I suppose you could. It's a reference book. I'll be hitting several of the chapters that are very pragmatic and relevant to my situation. 2. If you see Andy Cotgreave's name on this book, don't worry about it. Yeah, he's a beast and over the top like his co-authors, but there is something for everyone--novices, beginners, intermediates, and pros. There is something for everyone here. 3. And that leaves me to a new, slightly controversial comment. No criticism aimed at Stephen Few. I own all of his books. But The Big Book of Dashboards is practical. Interested in visualizing your NPS data? No problem. Sales dashboards? Check. I only bring this up because I almost didn't buy the book since I owned all of Few's. There is some overlap, but you will not be disappointed. I only have one gripe while still giving 5 stars. I want sample files. It appears many visuals were completed in Tableau, right? Backup files, Please. That would be great. Otherwise, this book is an easy 5 stars.

This is a great book if you are stuck on bar charts and line charts and you know you can be doing better, but you just don't know how to do it. I can't say that the book was revolutionary and I didn't exclaim "Wow!" or "Ah!" at any point while reading it, but it gives some solid examples of dashboards and thoughtful insights. The book focuses on the construction and logic behind dashboarding using some standard examples (hospital activity, sales, financials), so if you are looking for the nitty gritty of how to build these visualizations you need to go back to your Tableau 101. This is about figuring out the best way to convey lots of information without overloading the reader. This will become a reference book in my department and I foresee pulling it out for users to give examples of dashboarding ideas. I only wish there would have been more before and after examples. It is helpful to see what people are starting with and the thought process that created the final product. Overall, it is a helpful book that will guide data visualizers to the next level.

I really enjoyed BBOD, and I am incorporating its many nuggets into my dashboards. Learning by example and counter-example is the best method (see Siegfried Engelmann fore more on that), and that's the format of this book. There are related webinars on the Tableau website that are definitely worth listening to.The thing to keep in mind about this book is that's it's not a step-by-step cookbook of how to technically achieve vizzes in Tableau. It's a book about design. It can quickly take you from making average, hum-drum (if not disorganized and confusing) dashboards to world-class material. Below are some thoughts on certain vizzes/chapters: · CH 2 and 20 - Course Metrics and Complaints - I would encourage Tableau to research gray text readability. Perhaps I have a genetic rod deficiency, or maybe it's because of my age, but I find the gray text to be hard to read. I think the effort to reduce contrast crosses a usability threshold. I'd like to see some tests of a type "solve a problem in this dashboard" with different gray scales in text. I'd wager darker equals a faster solution up to a certain point after which it doesn't matter. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this: monitor size, font size, bold, brightness, contrast, so you have to experiment with what works for you and the majority or your users. · CH 11 - Premier League Player Performance Metric. I think the applicability of this viz approach can be generalized even further to unit:subset:universe. For this football (soccer) viz, it's the most recent match, 5 next most recent, then all season. So the viz is by sets according to time. It could also be by organizational hierarchy as in employee: department: division for a fixed time period. In this same manner, Chapter 3 (speaker ratings) is conceptually equivalent, but it lacks the subset level. You could have speaker, topic area, and then all others. CH 12 - Rugby Dashboard - This is an interesting chapter. One option for a scoring viz us using Gantt Bars. t would be nice the book's dashboard were shaded between the lines to emphasize who is leading. I know this is a long-sought (by some) Tableau function, and maybe it's not too hard to implement if it's reimagined as a "Gantt Line", which would be identical to a Gantt Bar use case, except that it graphs lines while coloring the intermediate space. You can kinda do that with 3 levels of unstacked area charts... but not exactly. · CH 21 - Overall, I like the aesthetics of the Hospital Operating room dashboard, but I expected the screaming cat icon ("don't do this!") over the top of it. The calendar of the viz resembles the periodic table of elements, and the labels seem to be at odds with the "reduce clutter" guideline. The numbers are just a bit too much for me, but they could be exactly what the customer wanted in this case. Hey, chemists LIKE the periodic table! And some people don't want to hover for tooltip details, or they may have other motivations. I like to try to put myself in the shoes of the consumer and ask "Would the color itself be sufficient for me to make an actionable decision?" To me, the numbers don't have to be on the viz, and the calendars can be shrunken to show other information, but the dashboard isn't designed for me. Overall, this book is a "top shelf" selection on dashboard design that you can revisit over and over for best practices.

I'm embarrassed to think about how many books I've purchased about presenting data and information visually. To be frank, visual storytelling is more important than having the right data. If people can quickly and easily consume the data, you likely have a winner. You'll lose them fast if it is just a bunch of graphs. The Big Book of Dashboards does a great job of showing you how to present data. It also does a great job of showing you how NOT to present the data. Finally, they show you how to combine multiple relevant datasets into one visualization in a very simple and easy-to-consume format. My company is in the business of telling stories with data. This book has and will continue to up our game. Thanks Steve, Jeffrey, and Andy for a great job.

I am using the BBOD as the required reading in my graduate Business Analytics course. The value in teaching Business students using the BBOD is the relatable use-cases and business scenarios. If BI isn't your cup of tea, it is also a great book to take inspiration from and apply best practices to in a myriad of other industries. It is a great manual to use when considering effective dashboard design in any organization. I use it in conjunction with the downloadable Tableau workbooks online, which allow you to dissect the dashboards featured in each chapter and replicate or redesign them further.

This book really stands out on two dimensions. What I love most is the care that went into assembling so many real world examples. It's easy to proclaim best principles and walk away. Finding examples that convey the lesson is the hard part. This book does that hard thing better than any other. You do not only get the lesson, not just one example, but many examples that paint a rich landscape of possibility. I also like how specific its focus is: business dashboards. Data visualization is now relevant in so many ways that it is easy to get caught up in arenas (e.g. infotainment, journalism, business presentations) that may look similar to dashboards in some instances, but have a very different purpose. I expect that in the future I hope we get even more targeted texts like this. Bravo!

Despite the title, this book is more about visually presenting individual data sets (perhaps for presentations), rather than identifying and monitoring critical business processes via a "dashboard". An automobile dashboard has achieved a high state of refinement over the last century and is the iconic example of monitoring important parameters in real time. Ideally, a dashboard should: * Monitor a few selected, important parameters (the business key performance indicators [KPI's]), * Compare these parameters to predetermined limits (like red lines or alarm points), and * Display the rate of change in time to permit correction, if necessary (how fast am I speeding up or slowing down?) all in one easily understood display. Out of all the performance data a business should have available, a select few of these should be designated as KPI's that will give a heads up to check in more depth if they depart from norms (e.g., sales calls per week, phone inquiries per day, warranty claims per month, etc.). A business dashboard should consist of those KPI's that are PREDICTIVE of future business activity or quality. So, a business-specific dashboard should be the KPI's identified that will continually assess these few parameters, compare them to established norms, allow interpretation of the information at a glance, and allow enough lead time to intervene before there are adverse consequences. Unfortunately, the book doesn't seem to offer any advice on how to select KPI's for particular types of businesses or how to arrange and present multiple KPI's (i.e., build a car-like dashboard) in such a way as to allow a human to rapidly assess the health of a business. Further, it doesn't even appear to suggest types of software that allow creation of the types of charts and graphs presented in their examples. The book is professionally edited and published on quality stock, but it falls short of the promise implied in the title.