In today's business world, dashboards are a central concept in aggregating and displaying all kinds of information. More and more data becomes available every day, and so, the need to understand this endlessly growing data is urgent. People have to get insights on these large amounts of data and use them for their business decisions. In a nutshell, a dashboard can be summed up with the following quote:
"An easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization's key performance indicators (KPIs) to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance."(Source: Peter McFadden CEO of ExcelDashboardWidgets)
The concept of data dashboards exists from as far back as the 1980s, and since then, they've gained a lot of importance for companies and are now a key concept for every company that wants to work in a data-driven fashion.