Building an interactive dashboard with slicers

Using the “Slicer” component of Dashboards, you can create an interactive dashboard that you can share with your stakeholders to allow them to drill down into your data without having to using the analysis design themselves.

In this tutorial, we’ll use the Who’s doing what where (3W) database template to create a simple dashboard that allows viewers to drill down by sector to find details about the ongoing humanitarian response.

Create a copy of the template database

Navigate to the database template page and click “Create your own database based on this template”. If you don’t have permission to add new databases in your organization, you will be prompted to create a free trial.

Create a dashboard

1. Navigate to the “Projects” form.
2. From the “Analyze” menu, click “Add dashboard”.

You should now see the blank grid of the dashboard:

First, let’s add a chart that shows which partners are active.

Partner pie chart

This chart will show the share of projects by partner.

1. Click “Add component”
2. Select “Pivot table”
3. From the “Select vizualization” menu, choose “Show as pie chart”

4. From the left hand side, scroll down to the “Parnter” form and drag the “Acronym” card to the “Series” area.
5. Drag the “Count of all records” to the “Measures” area

6. Click “Done” to return to the Dashboard.
7. Click on the chart, and then drag the Move and Resize handles to cover the left third of the dashboard

8. Click the “Untitled” card on the left hand side and enter the label “Projects by partner”

Province bar chart

This chart will show the share of projects by province (Admin level 1).

1. Click “Add component”
2. Select “Pivot table”
3. From the “Select vizualization” menu, choose “Show as bar chart”
4. Drag the “Admin 1” card to the “X-axis” area
5. Drag the “Count of all records” to the “Measures area”.

6. Click “Done” to return to the Dashboard
7. Click the new chart and position on the right-hand side

Add the sector Slicer

Now we will add the interactive “Slicer” that will allow report viewers to drill down to a specific sector.

1. Click “Add Component” and then select “Slicer”
2. From the left-hand side, select “Sector Name” and drag it to the “Slicer” column

The list of sectors in the table are the choices that will be presented to the viewer.

3. Click the “Done” button to return to the Dashboard
4. Click the Untitled Slicer component and enter the label “Filter by Sector”

You’ve now completed a very simple dashboard.

Using the Slicer

The Slicer component works as a filter on the other charts and tables on the page. Slicers don’t yet apply to map components.

In the Dashboard editor, you can click the dropdown with the placeholder “Filter by Sector Name” and choose one or more sectors.

The other charts will be filtered by this dimension, just as if you had added Sector Name to the Filter dimension in the Pivot table.

Sharing the interactive dashboard

You can now share this dashboard in two ways:

• You can save the dashboard as part of your database, and grant specific roles and users permission to view the report.
• You can publish the report, and obtain a link that anyone can use to view and interact with the dashboard, without logging in.

You can view an example of this published report live: