Executive Dashboard: How to Evaluate an Executive Dashboard

Executive Dashboard

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Who Should Use an Executive Dashboard?

You can think of an executive dashboard as a thermometer for your business. You don't have time to go to the doctor every single day, but you can take your temperature in just a few seconds. Like a thermometer, an executive dashboard gives you a quick, reliable indicator that your business is doing fine - and can alert you in an emergency if you need to see a specialist.

A good executive dashboard actually works like multiple thermometers - one to tell you the temperature of the sales department, one to tell you the temperature of manufacturing, one to tell you the temperature of development, and perhaps more. With a reliable dashboard, you can tell your business's overall health with one quick glance.

A good executive dashboard incorporates:

  • visual design best practices
  • real-time data updating
  • interactivity
  • quick and easy data connections






An executive dashboard is a critical tool for keeping your finger on your business' pulse. It consolidates information from all your company's databases and spreadsheets, allowing you to track key performance indicators in one single view. The exact metrics tracked by an executive dashboard will vary from business to business.

View an example of an executive dashboard that a manufacturer might use:
Manufacturing Executive Dashboard

Common Pitfalls of an Executive Dashboard

Designed properly, an executive dashboard is an indispensable tool that informs rather than impresses. Unfortunately, many manufactures of dashboard software seem to have forsaken this mantra. For years, "upgrades" to executive dashboard software have been sold by promoting the latest animations and special effects. Animated speedometers and blinking lights have made executive dashboards sluggish and slow when all we needed was a basic thermometer.

Recognizing a Quality Executive Dashboard

Modern dashboard software incorporates principles of good visual design to build an executive dashboard that actually saves executives time. Tableau's software allows non-technical users to create interactive, real-time executive dashboards. In seconds.

Are you asking enough from your executive dashboard? Before choosing an executive dashboard, ask yourself these questions.

  • The executive dashboard presents information as effectively as possible. Different data is best expressed through different visualizations. It should be easy to incorporate bar and line charts, maps, tables, scatter plots, and more into the executive dashboard.
  • The executive dashboard can draw data from multiple data sources. It should be simple to include data from any number of databases, even if they have different architectures.
  • The executive dashboard is easy to set up. It's your data, it shouldn't take three weeks for IT to give you access to it.
  • The executive dashboard is easily customizable. You should be able to change your dashboard based on your current needs, without the headache of going through IT.
  • The executive dashboard is easy to share, whether on an internal server or published to the web.
  • The executive dashboard is interactive and dynamic. It should automatically update itself in real time and allow you to drill down to see the latest data from your data source.

View an example of an executive dashboard for a sales executive:
Sales Executive Dashboard

Tableau's Executive Dashboard:

  • Uses principles of good visual design and the latest research in human perception
  • Aggregates multiple data sources into a single view
  • Links and filters all displays simultaneously
  • Publishes interactive dashboards to the web in just a few clicks
  • Incorporates web pages and documents for broader understanding

For more information on Tableau's executive dashboards and data visualization tools, see our product tour.

Other examples of Tableau Executive Dashboards:

Airline Executive Dashboard
Advertising and Marketing Executive Dashboard
Oceanography Executive Dashboard
Storm Tracking Executive Dashboard

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