Telling a Story with MicroStrategy Dossier

I joined the dossier authoring team in 2018. Our goal was simple — to build the next-generation dashboard editor. Back then, the dossier editor (formerly known as Visual Insight) was a powerful BI tool with limited design functionality.

“Data without context is meaningless.” We want every dossier, page, and visualization to tell a story. Over the past years, our team has worked tirelessly behind the scenes to develop new features toward that goal. Today, the incredible transformation from Visual Insight to Dossier authoring empowers thousands of MicroStrategy analysts with endless possibilities. Check out DossBoss for more of these amazing works created by our community!

A great story usually progresses towards a central message, and so should your dossier. In this article, you will learn how to incorporate storytelling to deliver insights to your end users, as well as how to use dossier features to build a narrative dossier.

Creating stunning infographic-style dossiers with Vertical Scrolling Pages

New scrolling capability allows for the creation of infographic-style dossiers that enhance data storytelling. You can now put more content on one dossier page and ensure the detailed visualizations have room to shine.

Since portrait orientation is the traditional layout for publication, scrolling allows the reader to naturally engage with the content from top to bottom. The predictable reading flow provides an opportunity for the author to lay out content in a more meaningful way. For example, to tell a story with data, I always like to include the headline, the title, the context, and eye-catching visualizations at the top to attract attention, put the main content in the middle, and leave the detailed grid/links/references at the bottom of the design.

The CO2 Emissions Infographic and Kobe Bryant Dossier are two great examples to showcase the combination of beautiful layouts and interactive infographics.

Furthermore, the entire long-form design can be exported perfectly into a PDF format.

To enable the vertical scrolling page, navigate to the page-level format by right-mouse-clicking on the Table of Contents (TOC) or clicking any empty space on the Freeform canvas.

Freeform Layout — Blending data into your design, not the other way around

Freeform layout maintains the responsiveness of the canvas while increasing the flexibility of design. Why waste precious screen real estate when you can distill the data to what’s most important through its visual presentation?

Freedom of design allows you, as the author, to plan the viewers’ consumption journey. You can use layers to provide necessary visual hints for the hierarchical data structure. In this RedStar Movie dossier, the shorter, darker panel behind the left panel explicitly indicates it contains the detailed information inherited from the Sale Overview.

Freeform layout also enables authors to fully customize the viewing experience. You can further construct the navigation menu that fits best to the design. Above are just a couple of examples from our UXD team to demonstrate how you can create a complex data-driven application with dossier authoring. Each designer created a navigation bar using out-of-the-box contextual linking to guide the experience within the dossier, instead of using the Library TOC.

Freeform layout / Auto layout can be toggled from the authoring toolbar. Check Use Free-Form Layout to learn more.

Responsive Group and Form-factor Show/Hide — Tailoring the mobile consumption experience

The dossier was built with responsive design in mind. Understanding percentage based layouts and responsive group will help the author to control responsive behavior. You can group elements that you want to appear side-by-side on a mobile device.

With the Form-factor Show/Hide, you can further define the content to show or hide based on viewers’ devices. In the Retail 2021 dossier, I created two separate navigation groups for web and mobile. This responsiveness and flexibility enables me to create one design suitable for all screens. In other words, you can create a dossier that always adapts to different viewer behaviors and provides the best consumption experience.

Learn more from Best Practices for Creating a Responsive Free-Form Dossier.

Enable authors to create information-rich dossiers with Panel Stack

The panel stack is the holder for a group of panels. It enables additional flexibility in analytics workflows, while optimizing the use of screen real estate. Each panel has its own layout settings. Authors can set the panel to use Freeform layout, Auto layout, or vertical scrolling.

The above example showcases how I created a fixed header menu to always remain on top, while the main content is in a scrolling panel.

Another use case is to display data in different visualizations on separate panels, so that viewers can see the rich content in the same place without changing pages and losing the context. Such continuous visual focus is the key to successful data storytelling.

When it comes to the data storytelling, as a designer, I always like to add visual treatments to engage the audiences with my dashboard design. Combining Panel Stack and Freeform gives me the opportunity to tell stories with data in a more artistic and interactive way.

Create data-oriented design with Visualization Gallery, Rich Text, Shapes, and more

Dossier authoring also comes with a ton of features to enhance the data storytelling. The Visualization Gallery is the go-to place to explore a variety of beautiful visualizations. The newly designed GUI offers an enhanced, organized and instructive way to choose the right widget for your data.

By enabling the Preview Feature, you can use the Rich Text editor to apply rich formatting at the individual character level. This is extremely useful to highlight the dynamic attribute/metric text in a briefing summary.

We also ship out-of-the-box shape elements to help you frame a visualization, create a layered effect, or visually group elements together, all in one place.

Unlike data visualization, storytelling with data enables authors to offer a more narrative, emotional, and holistic view of their information. It has never been easier for analysts, designers, or data scientists to engage in data storytelling with dossier. I believe by leveraging these new dossier features, you can also create a data-centered, beautiful, meaningful business application in your organization.