In Microstrategy 9.4.1 i created a dashboard from the web and then i tryed to edit it from the desktop and i got the following message
this analysis will be converted to a document and the change cannot be undone. are you sure?
I could read on the MSTR site that the difference between Dashboards and Documents is the following:
Document is a editing and formatting of report in a prescribed manner. where as Dashboard is a output result of Document. Dashboard is a Graphical view of Report in Flash mode and it is more interactive.
I want to say also that Documents and Dashboard are two different kind of object, they also have two different icons.
Quite long, go to the end for the quick answers.
Probably there is a bit of confusion on the MicroStrategy documentation because of the history of the terms Documents and Dashboard and how they were used.
In the past, MicroStrategy had only Reports (also called Datasets when used to provide data for a Document or a Dashboard) and Documents.
A MicroStrategy Documents allowed to do more fancy stuff, use data from multiple Reports (or Datasets), more formatting options (headers and footers), show more graphs or grids on the same screen, use Autotext fields (like to automatically show the current date, the prompt answers used, the name of the user running the document), and other thing that I forget now, but I think you got the idea.
Documents could be used to generate those huge PDF reports that nobody was going to read. Then the Business Intelligence world went frenzy for the dashboard thing.
MicroStrategy Documents were perfect for that, you just needed to have the whole document in a single screen and you had a perfect dashboard done with MicroStrategy.
Of course we are talking now about the time when people started to look at their data without printing them, maybe publishing them on the company intranet or some primitive websites.
MicroStrategy embraced this internet revolution offering the possibility to create flash based Documents and the possibility to edit them directly in your browser. I do suspect that at this point MicroStrategy Desktop and the Web editor were quite aligned in terms of functionality (even if sometimes it was hard to find that specific thing: i.e. if you have to format a graph in web you can do it only in the editable mode?)
Release after release the two environments become two different beasts and now some options are available only in one of them (i.e. sorting selector values). Sometimes it seems to me they lost part of the source code of MicroStrategy Desktop so they can do new things only in web. I'm joking :)
Back to dashboards, some of them were nice, most of them were so so (and people started to write about how to show your data in a better way). The main problem is that they are very nice to show data to big bosses, but they have really little value for operation people.
To tackle this problem new tools started to show up, tools to do easily data discovery, data visualization, data analysis, you name it. There were a number of new companies (QliK, Tableau) with new solutions. Initially they were doing just a slice of what a big BI tool was doing but people could use them knowing little or nothing of SQL, Data Warehousing and ETL and they were also looking cool too.
After a while MicroStrategy realized that they needed a cool tool to do the same things if they didn't want to fall behind, so with version 9.2 MicroStrategy announced his own tool for data analysis: MicroStrategy Visual Insight.
MicroStrategy Visual Insight was included with the standard user licenses, had a flash based engine and it was working only on web (and mobile).
Finally in version 9.4 MicroStrategy renamed Visual Insight MicroStrategy Dashboard.
TL;DR:
It's true often you can do a thing in desktop, but you can't do it in MicroStrategy web, or vice versa. Unfortunately nobody knows why.
MicroStrategy Dashboards can be edited only in web because they are flash based.