 How do I get started building a dashboard to make reporting easier? Dashboards are a powerful tool in analytics to put useful and relevant data at your fingertips, pulling them out of the databases and reports where they usually live, and curating them down to a limited set of insights. So you spend less time reporting and more time on analysis. Every effective dashboard starts with a purpose that serves as its organizing principle. If you're putting a set of numbers together, why? What do those numbers have to do with one another? And how will you respond upon seeing them? Then and only then should you turn to a dashboard tool like Google Data Studio or Power BI to start pulling data from its original sources into a concise and cohesive narrative. Keeping the dashboard's purpose front of mind will help you make subtle decisions about how you organize, style, and annotate your dashboard so that it's intuitive, makes clear to whoever reads it how they should take action based on the numbers.