Track overview: Visualizing Data

One Screen for a Storm Night. Welcome to the Visualizing Data track of ArcGIS Online Dashboard Essentials course. Picture a storm night at a utility. Outage reports pour in, crews are rolling, and the operations director asks two simple questions: how many customers are out right now, and are we getting faster at restoring them? Could you answer that on one screen in under ten seconds? By the end of this track you'll build dashboards that do just that, with charts, gauges, lists and tables that turn a busy layer into answers people can act on.

Who This Track Is For. This track is for people who watch the data every day, like operations staff and analysts, and for the managers and executives who read their dashboards. Before you start, you should be able to sign in to ArcGIS Online, find a hosted feature layer, and open it in a map. That's it. You don't need a design background, and you don't need to be a programmer. When we later write short expressions, every piece gets explained in plain words as we go.

Course 1: Charts and Gauges. The first course is Charts, Gauges, Lists and Tables, built in ArcGIS Dashboards. You'll start with serial charts, which are bar and line charts, showing service requests by category and splitting them by a field such as priority. Then you'll chart values over time. Date binning just means grouping records into buckets, like counting water main breaks per week instead of per minute. You'll learn when a pie chart helps and when it misleads, and use gauges to show progress toward a target, like repairs closed this month.

Course 1: Lists, Tables and a Project. Charts give the big picture, but people also need the details. The list element shows formatted rows, for example open traffic incidents sorted by how long they've been waiting, with a limit on how many appear. The table element shows detailed records in rows and columns, either one row per feature or grouped, like requests counted per district. Then it all comes together in a project: a service request performance dashboard for a customer service team, the kind a supervisor checks every morning.

How the Two Courses Build. Here's how the pieces fit. The first course gives you the building blocks: charts, gauges, lists and tables, finished with the service request project. The second course takes those same elements and makes them smarter and easier to read. You'll add formatting rules, reshape data with expressions, and tune the design for busy leaders. It closes with a second project. So you're never learning a feature in isolation; each step uses the one before it.

Course 2: Formatting and Expressions. The second course is Advanced Formatting and Data Expressions. Conditional formatting colors a number by thresholds, so an indicator turns red when open outages pass a limit, like a traffic light. Arcade is Esri's short expression language, a bit like a spreadsheet formula. You'll use it to format indicators, lists and tables, and to write data expressions. A FeatureSet is simply a set of records you can combine and reshape, for example joining outages with customer counts. You'll also add rich text, details and embedded content.

Course 2: Performance, Design, Project. Next comes speed and scale. Server-side aggregation means ArcGIS does the counting and summing on its own servers and sends back only the totals, instead of shipping every record to your browser. Skip this, and a large layer can hit query limits and quietly show incomplete numbers. Then you'll design for readability: color, visual hierarchy and number formats that an executive understands at a glance. The track ends with an executive KPI dashboard for a utility's outage response.

Getting the Most From It. A few tips. Go one lesson at a time, and right after each video, rebuild the element yourself in ArcGIS Online. Use a layer you know from work, or a public one from Living Atlas, such as traffic incidents or storm reports. Don't skip the two projects; they're where the skills stick. And when a dashboard is done, show it to a colleague and ask what they read first. Their answer tells you whether your design works.

Recap and What's Next. Let's recap the Visualizing Data track of ArcGIS Online Dashboard Essentials course. In the first course you'll build charts, gauges, lists and tables, and a service request performance dashboard. In the second you'll add conditional formatting, Arcade expressions, server-side statistics and readable design, ending with an executive KPI dashboard for outage response. That storm night question will take seconds to answer. Up next, we start with serial charts in Charts, Gauges, Lists and Tables. See you there.