Quick start: Tell a story with a dashboard

You can tell a story about your data without coding by creating and sharing an interactive dashboard. Read about the dashboard editor, then watch a video and take a tutorial that’s suitable for beginners and does not require coding.

Required service Cognos Dashboard Embedded

Your basic workflow includes these tasks:

  1. Create a project. Projects are where you can collaborate with others to work with data.
  2. Add your data to the project. You can add CSV files or data from a remote data source through a connection.
  3. Create a dashboard with the Dashboard editor. If you don't have the Cognos Dashboard Embedded service, you can create one for free.
  4. Add your data to the dashboard and create your graphs.
  5. Share your dashboard with others as a read-only web page.

Read about dashboards

With dashboards, you can build sophisticated visualizations of your analytics results, and communicate the insights that you’ve discovered in your data on a dashboard. The dashboard editor provides a graphical canvas for a line-of-business user to begin investigating data for patterns and insights. You don’t need to understand coding or SQL to explore the data and gain insights. You can share the results with other users both within your organization and externally through a URL link. Alternatively, you can hand off the dashboard to a data scientist for deeper analysis and predictive modeling.

Read more about Cognos dashboards

Watch a video about creating a dashboard

Watch Video Watch this video to see how to create a dashboard, view, and use data in customized visualizations, and save and share the dashboard.

Video disclaimer: Some minor steps and graphical elements in this video differ from your Cloud Pak for Data deployment. This video shows the Cloud Pak for Data as a Service user interface.

This video provides a visual method as an alternative to following the written steps in this documentation.

Try a tutorial to create a dashboard

In this tutorial, you will complete these tasks:

  1. Create a project.
  2. Add the data asset to your project.
  3. Add data to a dashboard.
  4. Visualize data on the first tab in the dashboard.
  5. Visualize data on the second tab in the dashboard.
  6. Interact with visualizations in a dashboard.

This tutorial will take approximately 30 minutes to complete.

Task 1: Create a project

You need a project to store the dashboard.

  1. If you have an existing project, open it. If you don't have an existing project, click Create a project on the home page or click New project on your Projects page.
  2. Select Analytics project as the project type.
  3. Select Create an empty project.
  4. On the Create a project screen, add a name and optional description for the project.
  5. Click Create.

For more information or to watch a video, see Creating a project.

Task 2: Add the data set to your project

  1. Download the Bakery and weather data.csv file.
  2. Add the Bakery and weather data.csv file to your project:
    1. From your project, click Add to project > Data.
    2. In the Load pane that opens, browse to select the Bakery and weather data.csv file, and click Open. Stay on the page until the load completes. The Bakery and weather data.csv file is added to your project as a data asset.

Task 3: Add data to a dashboard

Now create a dashboard and select the data source for the dashboard.

  1. From your project, click Add to project > Dashboard.
  2. Specify a name for your new dashboard.
  3. Click Create.
  4. In the Tabbed template section, choose the 2 over 1 layout icon that is divided in three sections, and click OK.
  5. In the Selected sources panel, click the Add a source + (plus) sign.
  6. Select Data asset, and choose Bakery and weather data.csv.
  7. Click Select.

Task 4: Visualize data on the first tab in the dashboard

Add visualizations to the first tab in the dashboard.

  1. In the Selected sources panel, click the CSV file source Bakery and weather data.csv to expand it and view all of the columns from the data set.
  2. Chart 1: Drag the single column called No of Transactions into the middle of the top left section of the dashboard.
  3. Chart 2: You can also select multiple columns. Hold down the Ctrl on your keyboard, and click No of Transactions, Sales in USD, and Product Group to select all three columns of data, then drag the selected columns into the middle of the bottom section of the dashboard. The dashboard service determines the best way to display the selected data.
  4. Click Properties to customize visual properties of the chart like colors and labels.
  5. Chart 3: Drag the Season column to the middle of the last empty section on the dashboard. You can select different seasons from the list and the other sections of the dashboard will change.
  6. Double click Tab 1, and rename the tab to Main Dash.

Task 5: Visualize data on the second tab in the dashboard

Add visualizations to the second tab in the dashboard.

  1. Click the Add new tab icon to create a second tab.
  2. In the pane that opens, select the 2 by 2 template icon that is divided in 4 sections, and click OK.
  3. Chart 1: Create a bar chart that shows the number of transactions for each promotion by season.
    1. Click the Visualizations icon to show the visualizations panel.
    2. Drag the Bar icon to the middle of an empty section of the dashboard to create an empty bar chart. The Fields panel displays on the right.
    3. Drag the following columns of data in Bakery and weather data.csv to their respective fields in the Fields panel:
      1. Drag the Season column onto the Bars field.
      2. Drag the No of Transactions column to the Length field.
      3. Drag the Promotion column to the Color field.
  4. Chart 2: Create a scatter chart that shows the number of transactions versus the dollar value in a given month.
    1. Click the Visualizations icon to show the visualizations panel.
    2. Drag the Scatter icon to the middle of an empty section of the dashboard to create an empty scatter chart. The Fields panel displays on the right.
    3. Drag the following columns of data in Bakery and weather data.csv to their respective fields:
      1. Drag the No of Transactions column to the x-axis field.
      2. Drag the Sales in USD column to the y-axis field.
      3. Drag the Month column to the Points field.
  5. Chart 3: Create a stacked column chart to gain insight on how season affects the sale of product groups.
    1. Click the Visualizations icon to show the visualizations panel.
    2. Drag the Stacked column icon to the middle of an empty section of the dashboard to create an empty stacked column chart. The Fields panel displays on the right.
    3. Drag the following columns of data in Bakery and weather data.csv to their respective fields:
      1. Drag the Product group column to the Bars field.
      2. Drag the Sales in USD column to the Length field.
      3. Drag the Season column to the Color field.
    4. Modify the stacked column chart to show the average number of sales for each season.
      1. In the Fields panel, click the 3 dots next to Sales in USD.
      2. In the context menu that opens, click Summarize > Average. You can also create your own calculation by clicking Calculation in the context menu instead.

  6. Chart 4: Create a map that visualizes the number of transactions spatially by state.

    1. Hold down Ctrl on your keyboard, and click No of Transactions and State to select them.
    2. Drag the selected columns of data over into the middle of the last empty section on the dashboard. The dashboard service determines the best way to display the selected data. The Fields panel displays on the right.

    3. Click Properties, and on the Visualization tab, customize the map appearance by removing the legend and disabling the automatic zoom.

      1. In the Chart section, select the Automatic zoom toggle to turn it off.
    4. Click the General tab in the Visualization properties panel to add a title.
      1. In the Appearance section, select the Show title toggle to turn it on.
      2. Type the title you want to give your map.
  7. You can modify the theme for the entire dashboard like the theme and background color.
    1. Click a blank space anywhere in the dashboard pane to deselect the chart.
    2. In the Dashboard properties panel, expand the Color and theme section, and select Dark in the Visual theme drop-down box.

Task 6: Interact with visualizations in a dashboard

Interact with all of the visualizations in each tab. All of the visualizations in a single tab are linked by default.

  1. Click one of the data points on the scatter chart. The rest of the charts should change based on the point you selected.
  2. Click the filter icon in the top right corner of any of the charts to see any filters that have been applied.
  3. Click the remove icon for each filter you want to remove and clear all of the filters.
  4. Create filters for users to interact with by dragging columns of data to the All tabs filter pane or the This tab filter pane.
    • Filters in the All tabs filter pane are available across all tabs.
    • Filters in the This tab filter pane are only available in current tab that you have selected.
    • Drag the Weather data to the All tabs filter pane.
    • Confirm the tab named Tab 1 is selected and drag the Season data to the This tab filter pane.
  5. Double click Tab 1, and rename it to Custom charts.

Next steps

Now you can use this data set for further analysis. For example, you or other users can do any of these tasks:

Additional resources