Turn Scroll-Fest into No-Mess with Dashboards & Presentations
Tags: Economy, Presentations, Data Visualization, Dashboard, Data Science

When someone asks you how your weekend was, you don’t start off by (potentially) boring them with the unnecessary details of how your Aunt Sally’s train was late and you wasted your afternoon waiting — no!

Generally speaking, you’ll say “it was great” or “it wasn’t so good,” and then go into more detail if the asker inquires further.

We dare you to take this seemingly unrelated piece of advice and apply it to your blog posts and articles.

Instead of creating a vertical “freight train” of graphs and content in your next blog post, consolidate the most important bits and get to the point faster using Plotly dashboards and presentations.

In this post, we demonstrate how a PitchBook article, chock-full of cool graphs and informative text, can easily be spun into a Plotly dashboard and presentation.

The resulting content is:

1. In One Place: It is reported that web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. That should be incentive enough to produce a compact article and reduce the scrolling that is necessary. Plotly embeddable dashboards & presentations can help you accomplish this!

2. Social Media Gold: Set your data into action and make an animated GIF of your dashboard for Twitter.

3. Downright Stylish: Plotly graphs and dashboards use D3.js, the gold standard of interactive web graphics. See for yourself, below!

Dashboard: https://plot.ly/dashboard/Dreamshot:8424

Presentation: https://plot.ly/~Dreamshot/8423/pitchbook-1/#/?_k=tu4ldl

1. Making a Dashboard with Plotly is Super Easy

Our 10-step tutorial should have you rolling along in minutes.

2. Turn Scroll-Fest into No-Mess

Instead of forcing readers to scroll and view individual graphs, a dashboard can help you to maximize your space.

3. Cleverly Customizable

You can re-size, re-shape, and re-style the dashboard to match that of your organization. We did just that in our PitchBook example.

4. Content that is Perfect for Presentations

Alternatively, you could embed a presentation in your article to truly eliminate the length and make the read completely undaunting to your readers. Plotly and Formidable’s Spectacle Editor allows you to do just that.

Simply create your graphs on Plotly, download Spectacle Editor, and bring your presentation to life.

For more details on best Spectacle Editor practices, check out our guide.

5. Presentations that Define Utility

Not really digging the presentation-embed in your article? Cool, when you share the link to your post on social media, include include an animated GIF of your presentation with it! Or, use it to build the best talk during your company’s next seminar and come away looking like the smartest person in the room. No more blurry, detail-lacking graphs — easy pan and zoom functions make it so even the person sitting in the way back can see exactly the moment that business was booming the most.

6. Game-changing for Social Media

If you article has 15 images, which are you going to use? It can be a tough decision. We want the decision to be easier and to boost engagement across your social media platforms. Quite easily take a screenshot (or two) of your Plotly dashboard and share that with your Tweet. GIFs are in, so if you have the technical know-how, pop one of those babies in and watch the retweets roll in.

If you liked this post, please consider sharing. If you’d like to learn how to make these graphs, visit our website or check out our tutorials. We have tutorials that show you how to make and embed graphs in your website, blog, or apps. To learn more about how companies are using Plotly Enterprise across different industries, see our customer stories.