Turn your data into beautiful ‘Dashboards‘ (dashboards / info graphics) to
- share with your team as part of your Truii data library,
- share with trusted colleagues through a password protected website or
- share with the world through a public web page.
What is a Dashboard?
A Dashboard is a web page focused on data. It could be as simple as a single chart to summarise your sales figures or a whole of business dashboard full of charts maps and analysis results. A Dashboard can even be an infographic where the focus is more on communication than data analysis and understanding. Dashboards usually take the form of a collection of data visualisations (charts, maps and analysis results) along with interpretive text to explain what is going on. The visualisations are linked the underlying data, so that when the data is updated so too are your visualisations.
Embed Dashboard visualisations in other pages
While your Dashboard may contain a collection of related visualisations, why not embed those visualisations in other webpages or your facebook posts. On any visualisation, simply click the embed code “</>” to get the shortcode. Embed this as an iframe in any HTML page.
The great thing about the embedded visualisations is that they are dynamic (users can mouse over, zoom in and out) and they are bound to the underlying data – so when you updated the data your visualisations on your dashboard or embeded on any other webpage are all automatically updated.
Figure 1: Example Dashboard - note, each Dashboard is a stand alone web page, or you can embed the whole Dashboard in other web pages (like we have done here), or embed individual visualisations, or simply 'like' a visualisation to include it on your facebook feed
Range of visualisations
In the initial release of the Dashboard we have focused on the core functionality of creating and publishing Dashboards. As part of this process we have created some really neat functionality to allow you to create web pages simply by dragging, dropping and resizing the visualisations. In this first release we include a collection of beautiful charts.
Charts
Create beautiful looking charts using data from multiple files on the same chart.
Time Series Chart
When your input data a temporal element (usually a date-time column) plot those values through time. Overlay data from several files at once.
Example time series chart showing growth in cellular phone subscriptions over time (source: Data is from the world Bank).
Category Chart
The data on a category chart is what you would traditionally include on a column or bar chart. Basically when your X axis is categories you want a category chart. The default style is to represent each series as a column displayed side by side, but once you explore the styling you will soon see that you can represent series as points or lines, you can stack the columns and scale the columns, you can also create filled areas under the series, ohh and don’t forget to check out the error options for adding error ranges.
Example category chart showing growth in cellular phone subscriptions over time (source: Data is from the world Bank).
Scatter
If you want to plot values against values (i.e. values on the X axis and values on the Y axis) then you want a scatter chart. If the data that you want to plot against each other isn’t in the same file – no sweat, just click the columns you want to plot – Truii will look for ways to match them up by looking at the other columns in the files to create a key as a basis to match the rows between the files.
Example category chart showing 2015 Happiness index (Source:Wold happiness report) vs GDP per person (source: world Bank).
Distribution
What is the distribution of those 10,0000 values? Simply click on the column and see the distribution plot. You can alter the number of groups to split the distribution into or switch to a log based distribution which is handy for those very skewed distributions.
Example distribution (histogram) chart showing growth in cellular phone subscriptions over time (source: Data is from the world Bank).
Pie
mmmm pie. Pie charts are a pretty common way to show proportions. Truii lets you bake beautiful pies.
Example pie chart showing top CO2 emitters by total volume for 2011 (source: Data is from the world Bank).
Maps
Coming soon -We are working on some neat mapping functionality that will be available shortly. First cab of the rank will be to allow you to create spatial layers based on geographic values (points or polygons) that you define for you columns in your flat (csv, excel) tables.
Analysis
Coming soon – You will see a range of data analysis in the data wrangling page (statistical analysis and data summary). The results from these analysis will soon be available for you dashboards. This means you not only have charts and maps, but data analysis reports directly in your dashboard. The neat part of this is that once you have a great dashboard layout, you can use it as a template by simply duplicating the page and linking to different data files. So just like you create a form letter in msWord and change the ‘Dear Sir’ field, you can create Dashboards with a common look but with different data – imagine repeating your monthly reports by simply uploading a new data file.
Other handy containers
Because Dashboards are simply a collection of containers, we can keep on building different containers for a range of visualisations. For example we have just created ‘curtain view’ container to visualise the results of a hydrodynamic model. The curtain view container lets us see the water quality down the middle of a river, over a range of depths and through time. If you have an idea for a visualisation, just let us know.
Text Container
Even great data visualisations often need some explanation. The text container is simply like a text box that you can format and style. By default it has a transparent background so you can put your text on top of the part of the viz you are explaining.
Image container
You might have a Viz that you have prepared earlier and saved as an image (or a funny cat photo). The image container simply lets you place and size files with common image formats (.jpg. .png, .tiff) anywhere on your dashboard.
Container container
Stay with us here. Imagine you have two charts that relate to the same data and you also have text containers overlayed on them to highlight key information. When you embed that combination of visualisations in some other web page you want to maintain all the relative positioning. In this case you put the collection of containers within a ‘Container container’ and you can simply embed the parent Container container in your external website. Without getting too carried away with the options, you can also treat an entire dashboard as a Container container – you can embed an entire Dashboard in another web page to keep all your visualisations together.
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