What is Dashboard?
A dashboard is a single screen that displays the most important figures and charts for a topic, so you can see the state of things at a glance.
Dashboard explained
Dashboards bring KPIs, trends and breakdowns together, usually with filters for date range or region. They answer recurring questions without anyone writing a new query.
Their weakness is that they only answer the questions they were built for. When a number looks odd, people need a way to ask a follow-up and see how the figure was calculated.
Example
A sales dashboard might show revenue this month against target, pipeline by stage, and a table of the top ten open deals.