SharePoint Dashboard Ideas

Like the dashboard of a car, application dashboards offer the opportunity to get a sense quickly of everything happening in one centralized place, with up-to-date information presented in an easily digestible format. Dashboards are often composed of key figures, charts and tables. If your organization uses SharePoint, dashboards can be useful to leaders, departments and individuals. This article walks you through making the most of SharePoint with some valuable SharePoint dashboard ideas.

Decide on Intent

What do you need your dashboard to do? If you’re new to dashboards, this may not be such an easy question to answer. However, setting an intent for a dashboard should be your first step, and a good place to start is by thinking about all of the information that you need to keep a close pulse on. Make a list. The idea is to save you time and effort spent fetching the individual pieces of information. Some pieces of information that can help inform your efforts include:

• SharePoint adoption numbers so you can identify and onboard inactive users
• Top pages and other content getting the most and least traffic
• Seeing what users are searching for so you can enhance the user experience
• Inactive content so you can make better use of it
• Seeing who is a recurring user vs who is going online just once and never again or very sporadically

Consider why the key information you identified is important and how it might be distilled into key nuggets of data that can be represented visually. Also, consider who will be using the dashboard, as this will impact how you create it. You can display any type of dashboard inside of a SharePoint page. More specifically, you can see how many people have visited the SharePoint site, how many times they have logged on, and what files have gotten the most views,  all potentially great information for a dashboard. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way within SharePoint to compare key performance indicators to one another, which makes it a long and painful process for internal communications teams to fetch the needed data item per item and then try to view it side by side.

Turn Ideas Into Dashboard Components

Dashboards are only as good as the data behind the individual components. Without data, a dashboard is just useless eye candy. If your goal is to maximize the effectiveness of your internal communication efforts, a tool like Tryane provides a powerful solution for understanding what’s happening under the hood, including things like

• Who your active or inactive users are
• Which departments are most active or inactive
• Tracking communication-related deliverables
• Analyzing your users’ behavior on SharePoint

Fortunately, Tryane integrates seamlessly with SharePoint to deliver this functionality. Not only that, but it also works well with other Microsoft products, allowing you to pull in data from Excel and other applications. So the question becomes: How can you turn those kinds of analytics into actionable dashboard items?

1. Display important reports with customized views. Put important reports at your fingertips so you don’t have to go digging each time you need them. You can use File Viewer in Web Part to accomplish this.
2. Track progress on key performance indicators. This presents the perfect opportunity to add some graphs and charts to your dashboard to easily understand progress on KPIs. Because SharePoint is made to integrate with other applications, you can bring in charts and tables from other programs. File Viewer does the trick, as does Quick Chart Web Part. Alternately, you can just embed some code if you have the tech knowledge to do so.
3. Perform project tracking and reporting. A simple status indicator illustrates performance information for your chosen metric. If your position involves project management work, this is a must-have and will greatly simplify your life.
4. Automate status reports with alerts. We all get too busy sometimes, and it can be difficult to keep on top of what is coming due or what we should be keeping our eyes on. A SharePoint dashboard can be set up to provide alerts for upcoming tasks or deliverables, ensuring that important deadlines never go unnoticed.

Setting up a working SharePoint metrics dashboard may seem like a time-consuming and daunting task. While it may prove to be both of those things for someone who is not technologically inclined, it’s likely that your organization has a department or person who can make easy work out of dashboard creation. The key, of course, is to provide detailed direction regarding what you need your data to do and what each piece of your dashboard should connect to.

SharePoint dashboard examples

The seven examples below are the dashboards we see intranet and internal communications teams build on SharePoint. Each one lists what it shows, where the data comes from, who reads it and the limitation you will hit first. Native sources have hard edges on history, audiences and comparison, which we cover in more depth in our guide to the limits of SharePoint native analytics.

1. Intranet adoption dashboard

• What it shows: how many people use the intranet home site or a hub, how often they come back, on which devices and at what time of day.
• Data source: SharePoint site usage analytics (settings gear, then Site usage). It shows daily unique viewer trends for the last 7, 30 and 90 days, site visits, average time spent per user, and visits by device and by time. The overall unique viewer count is only available for the last 7 and 30 days, and a hub site aggregates unique viewers and visits for up to 200 associated sites over the last 7 and 30 days^[1].
• Who uses it: intranet managers and digital workplace leads reporting on adoption.
• Limitation: there is no 12-month view on the page. Site owners can export 90 days of data to a .csv file^[1], so a year-on-year trend means exporting and storing the data yourself every quarter.

2. News reach dashboard

• What it shows: how far each news post travelled: unique viewers, total views, average time spent per user and traffic by time of day.
• Data source: page analytics, opened from Analytics at the top of a news post. With a Microsoft Viva suite or Viva Communications and Communities licence, it also shows reactions, promotions, unique viewers who clicked a link, a breakdown by channel (Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, Engage) and export to Excel or PowerPoint^[2].
• Who uses it: internal communications managers and editors.
• Limitation: figures are read post by post, so a campaign-level view means collecting the numbers for each post. Usage from guest and anonymous users is not included, and average time spent does not count the SharePoint mobile app^[2].

3. Top content dashboard

• What it shows: which site pages, news posts and documents get the most attention.
• Data source: the Popular content in the last 7 days section of site usage, sortable by unique viewers or visits, and by time spent for pages and news posts^[1].
• Who uses it: site owners and content owners deciding what to update, promote or archive.
• Limitation: it covers the last 7 days only, including in the export^[1], so it shows what is popular this week, not what has gone stale over a quarter.

4. Search insights dashboard

• What it shows: what people type into intranet search and where search fails them.
• Data source: search usage reports for modern sites (Site settings, Site collection administration, Microsoft Search, Configure search settings, Insights). They show query volume, top queries, abandoned queries with low click-through and queries with no results, for the past 31 days or month by month for the past 12 months, with an Excel download. A query only enters Top queries once it has been searched at least three times with a click on a result^[3].
• Who uses it: intranet managers, knowledge managers and whoever owns navigation.
• Limitation: the reports sit under site collection administration, so a communications team without admin rights needs a SharePoint admin to pull them, and they show failed searches without telling you whether people found the content another way.

5. Site activity dashboard for admins

• What it shows: which sites are active or dormant across the tenant: page views, pages visited, files, active files, storage used, sharing links and last activity date per site.
• Data source: the SharePoint site usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center (Reports, Usage, SharePoint, Site usage), with trends over the last 7, 30, 90 or 180 days and a .csv export^[4].
• Who uses it: SharePoint admins and digital workplace governance leads.
• Limitation: it needs an admin or reports reader role, user names and site URLs are hidden by default until a global administrator changes the setting, and data typically takes 24 to 72 hours to appear^[5]. It measures activity on sites, not whether a message reached a given audience.

6. Communications campaign tracker

• What it shows: the status of campaigns and deliverables (owner, due date, channel, status) with a simple chart of items by status.
• Data source: a SharePoint list shown on a page with the List web part, where readers can view, filter, sort and group items^[6], plus the Quick chart web part, which draws a column or pie chart from a list or library on the same site, or from up to 12 data points entered by hand^[7].
• Who uses it: internal communications teams and project leads.
• Limitation: Quick chart is deliberately basic (column or pie, and the column to display must be numeric)^[7], and the tracker is only as current as the people updating the list. It tracks output, not reach or engagement.

7. Executive KPI dashboard embedded from Power BI

• What it shows: a one-page view for leadership that combines several sources, for example SharePoint reach, Viva Engage activity and headcount by region, with trends kept over time.
• Data source: a Power BI report placed on a modern SharePoint page with the Power BI web part. Embedded reports respect item permissions and row-level security, but embedding does not give anyone permission to view the report: access is granted in Power BI^[8].
• Who uses it: heads of internal communications, communications directors and the executive committee.
• Limitation: licensing and maintenance. Embedding the web part needs a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User licence, and every viewer needs one too unless the report sits in F64 or higher capacity^[8]. The data pipeline is the harder part: the Microsoft reporting APIs these builds rely on can return inconsistent values or stop responding for days, so the model needs monitoring, retries and a named owner. We also see customers whose Power BI figures do not match the native SharePoint analytics for the same pages, and explaining that gap to leadership becomes a recurring task. Our guide to building SharePoint analytics with Power BI covers the build in detail.

Which dashboard to build first

If you are starting from nothing, begin with the news reach and search insights dashboards: both use data SharePoint already collects and point to changes you can make the same week. Add the executive view once you know which three or four numbers leadership actually reads, and keep the operational detail on the team’s own page.

With Tryane Analytics for SharePoint powering your data, a new, high-functionality dashboard can help you easily keep an eye on all of the important information impacting your job. You might just be surprised at just how well Tryane and SharePoint work together. Contact Tryane today to learn more about how it can help you make the most out of SharePoint.

Frequently asked questions

How do I create a dashboard in SharePoint?

Create a modern page on your site, then add web parts: Quick chart for simple column or pie charts fed from a list or library, the List web part for a tracker that readers can filter and sort, and the Power BI web part to embed an interactive report. Decide first which three to five questions the page must answer, and add only the parts that answer them. For usage figures, the native sources are the Site usage page under the settings gear and the analytics of each page or news post.

Can SharePoint show analytics?

Yes. Site admins, owners, members and visitors can open Site usage to see unique viewers, site visits, average time spent per user, popular content and traffic by device and time of day^[1]. Each page and news post has its own analytics, and admins get a tenant-wide site usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center over 7, 30, 90 or 180 days. What native analytics do not give you is a split by department or region, a year-on-year comparison, or a single view across SharePoint, Viva Engage, Teams and email.

What is the difference between a SharePoint dashboard and a Power BI dashboard?

A SharePoint dashboard is a page built from web parts and native analytics: fast to set up with what SharePoint already includes, but limited to simple charts and the time windows Microsoft provides. A Power BI dashboard can combine several sources and keep history, and it can be embedded in a SharePoint page, but it needs Power BI licences for the author and, below F64 capacity, for every viewer. It is also a system to maintain: Microsoft reporting APIs can return inconsistent values or pause for days, and Power BI totals can disagree with the native SharePoint numbers for the same content, so plan for monitoring and for explaining the difference.

What should I put on an intranet dashboard?

Only the numbers that lead to a decision: the trend in unique viewers, reach and time spent for the main news posts, the most and least viewed content, searches that are abandoned or return no results, and a split by department or site so you can see who is not being reached. Give every number a comparison (previous period or a target) so the reader can tell whether it is good, and move everything else to a separate operational view.

Sources

• Microsoft Support, View usage data for your SharePoint site

• Microsoft Support, View usage data for SharePoint pages and news

• Microsoft Learn, View search usage reports in modern sites

• Microsoft Learn, SharePoint site usage report (Microsoft 365 admin center)

• Microsoft Learn, Microsoft 365 admin center usage reports overview

• Microsoft Support, Use the List web part

• Microsoft Support, Use the Quick Chart web part

• Microsoft Learn, Embed a report web part in SharePoint Online (Power BI)

If you want to see what cross-channel reporting looks like against your real data, Tryane runs a 15-minute walkthrough with no slides. Book a slot with Jérémy.