Configure a dashboard from a template

The company you work for, Box Store Inc., is coming up on its annual planning period. To prepare for this planning, you and your colleagues in the sales department have been tasked with creating recommendations for strengthening sales in underperforming branches. To help your colleagues explore the data that has been collected for each location, you've decided to create a dashboard. ArcGIS Dashboards are designed to display multiple visualizations that work together on a single screen, which will allow your team to explore both regional trends and individual location statistics.

To save time before your presentation, you'll use a template that has been created for sharing sales data. Maps, and the layers in them, contain the attribute data that drive interactive apps such as ArcGIS Dashboards. When you use templates to create dashboards, you can swap out the data source by choosing a new map.

This tutorial is part of the series Integrate maps, apps, and scenes to tell a story.

This tutorial was last tested on August 7, 2026.

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Requirements

• ArcGIS organizational account with a Publisher, Facilitator, or Administrator role (see options for software access)

Configure a dashboard from a template

Explore a dashboard

You've found an existing dashboard that seems like it might fit your needs. You'll briefly review its configuration to make sure it's appropriate for your data and audience. You plan to use this dashboard in a sales team meeting to review regional trends and look at details about individual stores to see what may or may not be contributing to their growth. For this, you want a dashboard that has charts and indicators breaking down different indicators of performance.

1. Open the Store Sales Performance dashboard template.

   

   Dashboards are composed of configurable elements. This dashboard, which shows sales data for a fictional restaurant chain, has several types of elements: five indicators, two charts, two lists, a details pane, and a map. This dashboard is configured to give you at-a-glance information about the chain's sales performance.

2. On the map, click the Legend button to expand the legend.

   

   The layer is styled to show year-over-year growth. The size of the symbol corresponds to the store's sales changed in 2025 compared to 2024.

3. Close the legend.
4. On the Regional Performance chart, click Chicago Central.

   

   The map and elements update to show data for this specific region. This means that actions have been configured for the dashboard. Actions tie elements together to make the dashboard interactive. For example, by selecting the Chicago Central region on the chart, the indicators update to show that the region has 47 open locations that are making an average of $6,200 in sales each day.

5. In the Bottom 5 by sales list, click the first list item, 2617.

   The map zooms in to the selected restaurant. As you zoom, the elements update. Because this is now the only restaurant shown on the map, the indicators present information about this location. The restaurant earned $668,709 in 2025, which is significantly lower than the chain's average sales of $2.16 million per year. But, you can tell based on the chart showing Average Annual Sales, that this location opened in 2024.

6. In the Bottom 5 by sales list, click the first list item, 2617, again.

   The individual store is unselected, and the map resets to show the Chicago Central region.

Copy a dashboard

Now that you're familiar with how the dashboard works, you can decide whether it's one you want to copy. The dashboard has a lot of the metrics that you want to show for your Box Stores layer, so you'll create a copy and change the dashboard to show your data instead.

1. Open the Box Store Locations map.

   

   Note:

   If you completed the first tutorial in this series, Create a chart, you can instead open the copy of the map you created.

2. On the ribbon, click Sign In. Sign in to your ArcGIS organizational account.

   Note:

   If you don't have an organizational account, see options for software access.

3. On the Contents (dark) toolbar, click Save and open and choose Save as.

   

4. In the Save map window, provide the following information:
   • For Title, type Box Stores Performance.
   • For Tags, type Retail, Box Store, Sales, Tutorial.
   • For Summary, type This map shows sales data for the fictional Box Store locations in Louisiana.
5. Click Save.
6. On the Contents toolbar, click Create app and choose Dashboards.

   

   The Create new dashboard window opens. Here, you can choose either to build your own dashboard from scratch or to use a publicly available dashboard as a template. You'll use the second option here.

7. Copy the following item ID: 1269d41309994ad88e2a2218b6bb0fcb.

   This item ID identifies the demo dashboard you just looked at that contains charts showing data for sales over time, top performing store locations, and more.

8. In the URL of the Create new dashboard page, delete the item ID following the text #id=, paste the item ID you copied from above, 1269d41309994ad88e2a2218b6bb0fcb, and press Enter.

   

   The page reloads. The title now reads Sales Metrics demo dashboard. When you create this dashboard, you'll be creating a copy of this template.

9. For Title, type Box Store Louisiana Sales Performance.
10. For Summary, type This dashboard shows metrics for Box Store's Louisiana locations.
11. Click Create dashboard.

    

    The dashboard opens. Since it's a copy of the one you looked at earlier, it's configured with the same elements, actions, and data sources.

Update the data source

Now that you own a copy of the sales dashboard, you can begin to customize it for your purposes. You'll start by swapping the data source to the map you saved earlier. This same strategy can be used to customize dashboard templates with your company's data.

1. On the toolbar, click the Data sources tab.

   

2. In the Data sources pane, for Maps, next to National Location Sales, click Configure data source.

   The Configure data source window opens. The window is divided into two columns. The first column lists the map, layers, and attribute fields used in the current dashboard. In the second column, you can choose replacements for these sources.

3. In the first row, for the map element, click Change.

   

4. In the Select a map window, choose your Box Stores Performance map.

   

   The Fields section updates with similar fields drawn from the new dataset. For example, both datasets have sales data for the years 2023-2025, so these are automatically set to update. But the Box Stores dataset doesn't contain a Sales_R12 field, so its replacement field is marked in red for further review.

5. In the Fields section, for the Sales_R12 field, click the empty box in the Replacement column.

   A list of the attributes available in the Box Store Locations layer appears. Scrolling through the list, you can tell there's no R12 field in the layer, so you have two choices: you can delete the element that requires that field, or you can choose a similar field and update the dashboard later. In this case, the Box Stores dataset has an additional year of sales data from 2022 that you'll use instead.

6. For the Sales_R12 field, select Sales_2022 as the Replacement field.

   

7. Select the following replacements, noting where there's no direct replacement:
   • StoreID—Store_Name
   • InventoryValue—Inventory_Value
   • Sub_Region—CBSA_Name

   Not all of the fields have a direct, one-to-one replacement. For example, the Box Stores dataset doesn't have an average daily sales (AvDailySales) field. In these cases, you can choose a different metric that you want to show on the dashboard. Later, you can update the element on the dashboard to reflect the new field or delete it.

8. Select the following replacements:
   • AvDailySales—Square_Footage
   • OpsStatus—StoreKey
9. Click Done.

   The dashboard now shows the map and data for the Box Stores dataset.

10. On the toolbar, click Save and choose Save.

Configure the dashboard

The dashboard has been updated to show the Box Stores data. Where there were direct replacements for fields, the elements have been updated. But, as you noted, some fields didn't have direct replacements. They now need to be updated to reflect the attribute you substituted or removed completely from the dashboard.

1. Point to the menu for the indicator element that reads 0 of 20 Locations open and click Configure.

   

   This element previously showed the Ops_Status field, which reported how many stores within the map view were currently open. When you reconfigured the fields, you chose the Store_Key element as a placeholder. Since there is no direct replacement, you'll delete the element.

2. Close the Indicator configuration window. Point to the indicator menu again and click Delete.

   

3. In the Delete element window, click Delete.

   The element is removed and the other elements resize.

4. Delete the text element that reads This is a template dashboard.

   The other field that didn't have a direct replacement was the AvDailySales field, which you replaced with the Square_Footage field. An important metric to show for retail is sales per square foot, roughly calculated as sales/square footage, so you'll change this indicator to show the new metric.

5. Point to the menu for the Average daily sales indicator and click Configure.

   To calculate a ratio, you need to set two fields: the Value field and the Reference field. The Value field becomes the numerator of the fraction and the Reference field becomes the denominator.

6. For Value type, change Field to Sales 2025.

   

7. Expand the Reference group.
8. For Reference type, choose Statistic. Set the Statistic option to Average.
9. In the Reference group, for Field, choose Square_Footage.

   

   Next, you'll edit the appearance of the indicator to show this new data.

10. Click the Indicator tab.

    

11. For Indicator options, delete any text currently in the Top text, Middle text, and Bottom text fields.

    

12. For the Middle text field, type a dollar sign ($) and click Insert. In the Calculated values list, choose Ratio.

    

    The indicator now shows the formula ${calculated/ratio}, which will calculate the ratio Sales2025/SquareFootage. You'll add contextual text to the indicator.

13. In the Top text field, type or copy and paste Sales per sq ft and click Done.

    The last element that needs to be updated is the bar chart showing sales over time. You substituted the Sales 2022 field for R12, and now the chart needs to be reordered temporally.

14. Point to the menu for the line chart element and click Configure.
15. In the Serial chart window, for Category field, drag Sales_2022 to the top of the list.

    

16. Click Done.

    

17. On the ribbon, click Save and choose Save.

    To share the dashboard with your colleagues, you'll share the dashboard with your organization.

18. On the ribbon, click the menu button and choose Dashboard item details.

    

    The item details page opens.

19. Click Share. Under Set sharing level, choose Everyone (public).

    

20. Click Save.

In this tutorial, you copied and customized a template dashboard to share sales data with your colleagues. This method can be used to copy any publicly shared dashboard and change the data source to your maps and layers. This process can save time in recreating dashboards that are commonly used in your organization, such as inventory dashboards that need to be created for each individual store, sales dashboards that need to be created each year for performance reporting, and more.

This tutorial is part of the series Integrate maps, apps, and scenes to tell a story.

You can find more tutorials in the tutorial gallery.

Acknowledgements

• The data used in this tutorial is fictional. It should only be used for educational purposes.
• Human Geography Map sources: Esri, TomTom, Garmin, FAO, NOAA, USGS, OpenStreetMap contributors, and the GIS User Community