Christmas has just passed. What gifts did you receive and what did you give this Christmas? Are you curious about what are the top selling items for Christmas 2019, and what are the most popular gifts people want? The answers to these questions are in the Christmas sales dashboard I made below. Let’s take a look.


This Christmas dashboard is an online sales dashboard that I made with data from the Internet.

Let’s first look at the two charts on the left. The bar chart below shows the sales of each category of products, and the line chart above shows the annual sales of a certain category of products. Note that the two charts on the left are linked, that is, if you click on different product categories in the bar chart below, the annual sales volume of the corresponding product category will be displayed in the line chart above.

The cool 3D earth map in the middle shows the logistics route of goods ordered for Christmas, and the thickness of the flow line corresponds to the sales volume of the goods. We can also customize the style of the flow lines.

In the upper right corner of the dashboard is a word cloud diagram showing the categories of Christmas gifts people most want. The larger the font, the more popular such gifts are.

Finally, let ’s take a look at the real-time sales chart in the bottom right corner. This chart can be connected to a database system to update the real-time sales data. And through the above water polo chart, we can observe the warehouse stock of the products in real time. When the storage volume is below the warning line, a red warning will be displayed, and a pop-up box will appear informing you: out of inventory.

Now, I believe you all know what are the most popular Christmas product categories. The data on this Christmas sales dashboard may be not accurate, but you can still learn from the implementation of data visualization and the design of the sales dashboard. If you are interested, I will be happy to share with you the methods and tips for making this Christmas dashboard. The following is the specific production process.

Step 1: choose tools and prepare data

Well, first we need to choose an appropriate data visualization tool or BI tool that can design cool dashboards. If you have strong technical skills, you can also use a programming language like Python or R. The tool I use to make this Christmas dashboard is FineReport. You can download its personal version from the official website for free use.

The data in the Christmas dashboard was obtained from Statista. And the data is stored in Excel file. Next we need to import data into FineReport.

Step 2: import data

After you download FineReport, place the Excel file in the folder “Reportlets” on your computer. Or you can use your own data and connect FineReport directly to your database.

Step 3: chart linkage

To achieve the linkage of the data, you can select a database to connect data.

And to achieve chart linkage, use simple SQL statements as conditions.

Step 4: design layout

After preparing the data, start with the layout. I choose the type of Absolute Layout. Click “body”, and you can set its properties.

Step 5: insert charts

We just need to drag and drop to insert the charts. For the selection of charts, you can refer to this article Top 16 Types of Chart in Data Visualization.

The overall layout is as follows.

Then set the data for the chart. Select the data required for the chart in turn.

For the linkage effect, we have set simple SQL statements before. Now we set the parameters for the charts that need linkage.

Step 6: display data in real time

The real-time sales chart on the bottom right can update the sales data in real time. This effect is directly achieved by the free plug-in of FineReport.

By the way, the effect of snowflake is realized by JS. You can do it yourself.

(FineReport has a professional UI team which owns rich experience in dashboard design. Contact us to get the JS code for free.)

At Last

Well, these are the main steps to make the Christmas dashboard. If you still have questions about the operation, there are two more detailed guides for your reference: A Step-by-Step Guide to Making Sales Dashboards and How Can Beginners Create a Great Dashboard.

You might also be interested in…

A guide to take your data reporting to another level

Dynamic Charts: Make Your Data Move

What is Data Visualization for Large Screen and How to Implement It