Building Interactive Dashboards with Embedded Actions in Sigma

Learning how to build interactive dashboards is essential for enabling real-time analysis and faster decision-making. Traditional BI dashboards are often static, limiting exploration and creating dependency on analysts—making them ineffective for modern, self-service analytics needs.

Limitations of Traditional BI Dashboards

In many organizations, dashboards are built as static reporting tools rather than interactive analysis platforms. They display high-level KPIs like Sales, Profit, or Margin but are locked to fixed time grains, dimensions, and predefined views. When users spot anomalies—such as a sales drop in a region or increased discounting—they cannot explore further on their own and must rely on analysts to modify reports, turning simple questions into time-consuming back-and-forth.

This rigidity creates analyst dependency and bottlenecks. Analysts repeatedly handle ad-hoc requests to change groupings, time frames, or filters, while business users lose momentum and delay decisions. As a result, dashboards often fail to answer real-time questions. Without drill-downs, measure switching, or cross-filtering and Actions, users see what happened but not why, making static dashboards ineffective for fast-paced, data-driven decision-making.

Interactive, Action-Driven Dashboards Using Sigma

Sigma addresses the limitations of static dashboards by enabling fully interactive dashboards with embedded actions. Using Sigma’s controls—such as filters, buttons, and parameters—dashboards become dynamic and responsive to user input. From a technical standpoint, parameters and calculated fields allow a single chart to support multiple time granularities (Day, Month, Quarter, Year), dynamic groupings (Region, State, Category), and selectable measures (Sales, Cost, Profit).

Embedded actions further enhance interactivity by allowing users to click on charts or tables to automatically apply filters, pass context between elements, or navigate to detailed views. These interactions are handled within Sigma’s semantic layer, ensuring consistent logic and accurate aggregations. As a result, dashboards evolve from static reports into self-service analytics experiences, empowering users to explore data independently and make faster, more informed decisions.

Technical Implementation in Sigma (With Examples)

1. Embedded Actions in Sigma - Actions let users interact with dashboards by clicking charts or tables, while Sigma automatically applies filters, passes values, or navigates to detailed views behind the scenes.
2. Click-to-Filter & Drill-Down- Business use: Click a Region or Category to instantly update all visuals or drill into details.
   Sigma setup: Use Filter actions to sync charts and Navigate actions to move to detail pages with context passed automatically.
3. Business Impact- Simple, intuitive interactions replace manual filtering and repeated analyst requests, enabling faster, self-service insights without technical effort.