Today, there are several advanced interactions, workflows and actions that help end-users explore dashboards and act on data in a way that delivers everyone more relevant, valuable insights.

Interactive elements and functions are integrated into dashboards in order to assist and encourage users to view, explore, investigate, and think about their data. Understanding these features is key to ensuring people get the most out of their dashboards. Without such knowledge, dashboards may not be used in the most optimal way, resulting in potential missed insights, and lesser perceived value of analytics.

This section will cover the numerous ways end-users can interact with in-draft and published dashboards, set up workflows, and act on relevant insights and displayed results.

Drill refers to the action performed by a user who clicks on a hyperlinked value or interactive element in a dashboard which brings them into more detail within the same report, or opens a separate report related to the value selected. Knowing what drill is, how to use it and why it’s useful is key to getting more out of your data discovery and insight generation efforts.

Filtering is a key function of any dashboard and report. Filters help end-users find the answers they need in an organized and structured way, and are necessary to increase user interactivity with their data outside of surface-level, ‘at-a-glance’ analysis.

Actions are interactive elements added to dashboards and the tabular reports embedded within that can be configured to launch a particular function for the user consuming the information. They allow an end-user to do something when they see a KPI or metric on their dashboard.

Write-back refers to the ability for end-users to change and update values and text in a data source database. If a business intelligence dashboard allows a user to write-back, then the appropriate metrics will be displayed as editable fields - otherwise they appear as standard.