How to choose tools for web dashboard?

I am working in a small sales company. Started with making relatively easy, small, static reports in Excel, but then it was required to make a lot of highly-customizable and adaptable reports, that are really troublesome to do in Excel. I do a lot of VBA, but that still doesn't meet my needs. Our ERP has no BI solution. Excel can't keep up with amount of data used (millions of lines).

I am only accustomed to JS and HTML and have some experience working with relational databases (MySQL, MariaDB in particular).

Basically, what I need help with is deciding what tools would be appropriate for my needs considering I am not in a rush and would like to develop some skills along the way.

I would like to create a dashboard that would retrieve data from a local DB and process it. I would also need the dashboard to be dynamic - be able to change some inputs and run calculations accordingly. I am interested in packages that are suitable for mathematical analysis. Reports would include both tables and graphs.

I've read about R and Python packages, but still am not sure which one would be the most appropriate.

In the future I guess I would like to distribute it to other colleagues (run it from a server; have different accounts with different access level etc.).

Will highly appreciate any tips!

Topic data programming

Category Data Science


There are quite a few tools that serve this purpose (E.g.: Tableau , QlikView are expensive but feature rich; Kibana / Dash have Open Source versions).

You can start with Kibana. It will take a week to learn it. Advantages are :

  1. Part of ElasticSearch stack, it is easy to ingest data (Say that you need to update data from ERP every hour / day /week etc.) 'Logstash' component isused for ingesting / updating data
  2. Widely used, so tutorials / documentation are easy to look up
  3. You can customize dashboards with JS / html
  4. As usage grows, you can add features (Such as access control, periodic email of reports as PDF / Excel etc)

Some tutorials / Documentation :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibana https://www.elastic.co/products/kibana

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ1c1uILyKI

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