2013

Birst Trial Getting Started Exercise 3

Dashboard

Write your new Birst Username and Password here!

Username:
Password:
Birst, Inc.
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Copyright

Trademarks
Birst, Inc. and the Birst logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Birst, Inc. in the United States and
other countries. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. Product
specifications and program conditions are subject to change without notice.
Copyright 2013 Birst, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Exercise 3: Getting Started in Dashboards

Business Scenario:

SupremEats currently has eight data sources that are all contained in an Excel filethe file is called
SupremEats 2011. Your first role is to create a space in Birst and upload your data file. You will then
set your data sources Primary Keys and connect related data sources together. You will also have to
ensure that identical columns have the same field names across sources.

Primary Keys: In each source, you will need to find a column that most uniquely identifies that source
(known as the sources primary key). Looking at SupremEats data, you have found that each source has
a column of identification numbers that are best for uniquely identifying each source. The only source
that does not have a single column that uniquely describes it is the Order Details source. You find,
however, that the combination of two ID columns will uniquely define that source.
Identical columns with different field names: To relate sources, they must share a column in common.
You know that one column is shared between two of your sources but it is named differently in each
source. You will need to keep this in mind so that you can join your data sources correctly.
Birst Best PracticeWhen creating your space, add the suffix of DEV to your space name to indicate
that it is a development space. Once your space is fully configured, it can be copied for QA and UAT
testing and later renamed to PRD for the production (live) environment.

Assignment:

Download

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Exercise 3: Setting Up a Dashboard

Business Scenario:

All of your reports are now ready to be inserted into the dashboard! In this exercise, you will create a
dashboard for the Operations team.

You will also set up prompts for the reports. Prompts are filters. By setting up prompts in your
dashboard, your dashboard end users will be able to filter reports by the prompts you have set up (e.g.
by year or product).
Finally, you will set up properties of the dashlets to enable end users to: access the Designer mode to
further edit the reports; and to export reports to PDF and Excel files.

Assignment:

Create a dashboard
Split it into 3 dashlets
Add 3 reports to the dashboard and custom-size the dashlets
Add prompts to dashboard
Edit dashlet properties
Practice filtering your reports using prompts and drilling
Practice exporting your reports to PDFs and Excel files; editing them via the Designer Module
shortcut; and expanding and collapsing your dashlets

Instructions:

Set Up Your Dashboard and Add Reports

1. Go to the Dashboards Module of Birst

2. Click on the + tab to create a new dashboard

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3. Divide the dashboard into 3 dashlets

a. Right-click in the dashboard creation area and select Split vertical
b. Right-click in the top dashlet and select Split horizontal

4. From the Add Reports panel at left, drag exercises 1-3 into the dashlets as shown below. These
will be in your Shared folder.
5. You can adjust the size of the dashlets by clicking and dragging the dividing lines (see image below).

Ex 1

Ex 3

Ex 2

Dividing Lines

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Add Prompts to Your Dashboard

1. Add a prompt to your dashboard
a. From the Add Prompts panel, drag and drop the Attribute ProductName
(Products>ProductName) into the dark grey area above the dashboard.
b. Dashboard end users will now be able to filter reports by ProductName.
Please note that this prompt will only apply to dashlets if report results in a valid query. This means that if
there are no joins between one of your reports below and the ProductName attribute, the ProductName
prompt wont apply to that report.

Set Up Your Dashlet Properties

1. Now, remember how you added a Column Selector to Report #3? Lets enable this by editing our
Dashlet Properties for this dashlet. While were at it, we can enable export options and View
Selectors.
a. Click the Edit properties icon

b. Enable PDF, Excel, Column Selectors and Designer

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c. Click Save
2. Now access the Dashlet Properties of Ex 2, and enable View Selectors.

Save and Test Your Dashboard

1. When youre happy with your dashboard, click Save and name your dashboard. Save to your Private
folder.

2. Practice using the prompts

a. Click on the chevron at the top left of the page. Click on Chai and then Apply.
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3. Undo your filter by clicking the Undo button

4. Drill down on the year 2011 by clicking the third plotted point in one of the trellised charts (Exercise
3)

5.

Try clicking on the dashlet options in the right-hand corner. These are the options you added in
Dashlet properties. The icons shown below are:
a. Designer: opens the Designer from within the Dashboards Module
b. Export to Excel: exports data from report to XLS file
c. Export to PDF: exports data from report to PDF file
d. Expand/close dashlet: clicking this icon will expand a report to take up the entire space of
the dashboard (other dashlets will be hidden). Clicking it again will return the view with all
dashlets

Set Up Bookmarks for Your Dashboard

Now that your dashboard is complete, you can set up bookmarks specific to your end users. Birst allows you
to save a customized version of a dashboard page by bookmarking it. A bookmark saves filter settings,
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column and view selections, added and removed columns, and report layout changes. A bookmark does not
save the result sets.
1. Set up your dashboard the way you would like it to be bookmarked
a. Filter your dashboard by Ipoh Coffee.
b. Drill on the year 2010.
c. In the dashlet with Ex 2, set your View Selector to Table.
2. Now youre ready to create a bookmark
a. Clicking on the gear icon and selecting Page Options and then Add bookmark.
b. Name your bookmark, add any comments, and Save your bookmark.
You can then manage your bookmarks by going into Page options>Manage Bookmarks. From the Apply
Bookmark window, you can apply a bookmark, delete bookmarks or set a bookmark as your default. Once
a bookmark has been set as default, you can apply it by going to Page Options>Apply default
bookmark.

Your dashboard is complete! It is ready to be shared with your Operations team so they can begin to study
the data. Nice job!

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Review & Conclusion

Admin and Designer Modules

In the Admin Module, you created a new space, uploaded your data and created a logical data model. To
create your data model, you assigned Primary Keys to columns that uniquely identified each data source.
Next, you made sure that all data fields were correctly mapped and you connected related data sources.
Finally, you processed your data in order to update your data warehouse to reflect changes and
relationships made when defining your data model.
The next step was to create reports. In the Designer Module, you created four reports, using the pivot
control to help you manipulate the organization of your report. You added two types of charts to your
reports.

Dashboards Module

In the Dashboards Module, you divided your dashboard into dashlets and dragged in reports from your
report catalog in the order you desired. You adjusted the size of your dashlets to fit each of the reports.
Next, you added prompts that you thought your dashboard end users would want to filter the reports by.
You also enabled end users to edit reports through a direct link to the Designer Module; and you allowed
them to export reports to PDF, XLS and perhaps CSV or PPT.

Your Analysis

With the new dashboard created, you will now want to share it with the Operations team. Since security
settings are not enabled in Birst Express, Operations will view their dashboard via the Dashboards Module of
Birst Express. From the reports you created, users will be able to review beverages sold by quarter by year,
in order to evaluate the best sales methods for selling beverages. The Operations team can also study the
quantity of orders by customer by product by year in order to see which products might be easier for the
Sales team to push to each customer. The bar graph created to show average discount by employee by year
is a quick way to see which employees are giving out the most discounts. This data could then be compared
against another report of employee sales to see if the amount of discounts employees are giving out is
resulting in greater revenue for SupremEats or an overall loss of revenue. The line chart of orders by shipper
by year shows the number of orders each shipper ships each year. This information can help Operations
quickly determine which Shipper is the most valuable. Perhaps Operations is thinking of using only two
shippers in order to get greater bulk discounts. The line chart could be used to determine if one shipper is
used less frequently than othersperhaps their products could be shipped by one of the other shippers.
When using the dashboard you created, end users will be able to drill down on fields that have hyperlinks.
They will also be able to filter reports using prompts or by click-and-dragging a bounding box around desired
fields.
Once a report has been filtered as desired, the Operations team can export it and send it to their team or
decision makers.

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Conclusion

Your CEO is very impressed with your work! Previously, SupremEats spent hours having report designers in
each department create reports from data specific to their departments (i.e. the Sales team created sales
reports, Operations created operations reports, HR created HR reports, etc.). Each month and quarter,
reports had to be updated by exporting data from a collection of Excel spreadsheets and then manually
entering key numbers into report templates. Only once these reports were complete, new reports using
data across departments could be created for a holistic look at company data.
Using the new logical data model you created in Birst Express, your company is now able to quickly and
easily report on data across departments. Only one or two people are needed to create reports and
dashboards. Once dashboards are created, theyre automatically updated when new data is uploaded and
processed.
Congratulations on creating your first dashboard in Birst Express! Have fun reporting with your new business
analytics software!

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