Welcome to the course: what you will learn

A storm hits at 2 a.m.. Welcome to ArcGIS Online Dashboard Essentials course. Picture a storm rolling through your city at two in the morning. Power is out in three neighborhoods, a water main has broken downtown, and field crews are spread across town. Your director wants one answer fast: where do we stand right now? Instead of emailing spreadsheets and screenshots, you open a single live screen with a map, counts of open incidents and a chart of outages by area. It updates by itself and works on a phone in the field. By the end of ArcGIS Online Dashboard Essentials, you'll be able to build that screen yourself, share it safely and keep it running.

Who this is for. This course is for people who need to watch geographic data and share it on one screen. That includes operations staff in a control room, managers who track service levels, executives who want the big picture, and analysts who build the views everyone else relies on. You'll need an ArcGIS Online account that lets you create content. Some comfort with maps and spreadsheets helps, but you don't need to be a GIS expert. Whenever a new idea comes up, like a hosted feature layer or an Arcade expression, we'll explain it in plain words before using it.

Track 1: Dashboard Foundations. We start with Dashboard Foundations. In Data and Maps Ready for Dashboards, you'll learn what a dashboard is for and how ArcGIS Online content fits together. A hosted feature layer is your data stored in the cloud, like a shared spreadsheet that also knows where each row sits on the map. A web map arranges those layers with colors and pop-ups. Then in Your First Dashboard, you'll place a map and indicators, which are big single numbers such as open incidents today. After this track, you can build and share a working incident monitoring dashboard.

Track 2: Visualizing Data. Next comes Visualizing Data. In Charts, Gauges, Lists and Tables, you'll show service requests by category, trends by week, and progress toward a target on a gauge, which works like a car's speedometer. You'll also learn when a pie chart misleads. Then Advanced Formatting and Data Expressions adds Arcade, Esri's expression language. Think of it like spreadsheet formulas for your dashboard. With it, an indicator can turn red on its own when outage counts cross a threshold. After this track, you can build a clear executive KPI dashboard.

Track 3: Interactivity, Sharing and Operations. The last track is Interactivity, Sharing and Operations. In Making Dashboards Interactive, clicking a chart bar or zooming the map filters everything else on screen, and dropdowns let viewers pick a district or a time window. You'll also open a dashboard already filtered through a link, and set it to refresh live. Then Publishing and Operating Dashboards covers sharing with the right groups, mobile layouts for field crews, embedding in Experience Builder and Hub sites, and keeping dashboards fast and safe to update. After this track, your dashboards are ready for real operations.

How the parts build. Here's how the six courses stack up. Good dashboards start with good data, so we prepare layers and maps first. Next you put them on a dashboard. Then you learn to show the numbers clearly with charts and tables, and to polish them with formatting and Arcade. Once the display is solid, you make it interactive. Finally, you publish it and keep it running. Each step leans on the one before it, so it pays to take them in order the first time through.

Six hands-on projects. Every course ends with a project drawn from real public service work. You'll prepare a water main break web map for a city operations dashboard, then build an incident monitoring dashboard with a map and three indicators. You'll track service request performance for a customer service team and create an executive KPI dashboard for a utility's outage response. Then you'll link charts and selectors in a traffic incident dashboard. The finale is an emergency operations dashboard for storm response that works on both desktop and mobile.

Getting the most from it. Lessons are short and focused, so watch one, then try it right away while it's fresh. Build every project in your own ArcGIS Online account, even if it feels simple, because clicking through it yourself is what makes it stick. When you can, swap in data from your own organization, such as your service requests or asset layers. And treat the lessons as a reference later. When your manager asks for a mobile layout next month, you'll know exactly which lesson to reopen.

Recap and next steps. Let's recap ArcGIS Online Dashboard Essentials. First you'll prepare data and build your first dashboard. Then you'll show it clearly with charts, gauges, tables and Arcade. Finally, you'll make it interactive, share it securely and keep it running for real operations like storm response. That's a skill set you can use in your job right away. Up next is the first course, Data and Maps Ready for Dashboards, where we'll look at what a dashboard really does and get your data ready for it. See you there.