Build a custom dashboard

Pick the widgets that matter, arrange them how you think, and save the view, so the numbers you care about are one glance away, every day.

It's easy to build a dashboard that shows everything and tells you nothing. The useful ones start from a question you ask often, how are we doing on X?, and put the answer where your eye lands first.

This guide helps you pick the few metrics that actually drive your decisions, arrange them for a glance, and leave the rest off the screen where it belongs.

A dashboard is a set of answers, so start by writing the questions: what do we check every morning, what would make us change plans this week, what does the boss ask before the monthly review? Widgets that answer none of those are furniture.

Give the layout a reading order. Top-left is prime real estate for the one number that summarizes health; trends support it below; detail tables go last. A dashboard scanned in five seconds gets opened daily, one that requires study gets opened before meetings only.

Set the time range and comparison deliberately: this week versus same week last month tells a story; an all-time line goes flat and hides everything. And prune quarterly, every widget someone stopped reading makes the remaining ones harder to see.