Dashboards get really powerful when they are able to display recent or even real-time data. Of course, you can manually enter the updated data in the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards spreadsheet and publish a new dashboard every time the data changes. If your dashboard uses a lot of data that changes regularly, you will quickly find out that this is a very time-consuming task.

A good solution is to set up one or more data connections between the dashboard and an external data source. If the data in the source changes, the dashboard will show this updated information.