This article is a guide to get started with the dashboard editor. It explains why and how to create dashboard templates using widgets and filters.
Making dashboards individual
With dashboard templates privileged users in your organization are able to setup and distribute customized dashboards to your users. Dashboards allow you to get insight into checklists and assignments on an aggregate.
In order to get access to the dashboard designer, your users need to have the corresponding role.
Go to Roles tab. Choose the relevant role and click edit.
In the list of the different privileges tick of “manage dashboard templates”.
Users belonging this enabled role will then find the “Dashboard Templates” item in their menu under the “Organization” section.
Step 1: Creating a dashboard template
Go to the Dashboard Templates tab. Create a new dashboard template by pressing the + in the top left corner. This will open a blank template for your new dashboard.
Name the template and add a description if you like.
Select any users or user groups which this dashboard’s distribution should be limited to. Only the name is mandatory at this point and all settings can be edited later.
Note: If you do not want other users to have access to the dashboard while you are working on it, make sure that your name is the only one shown under “Limit to” until you are ready to share it.
Step 2: Adding widgets
When designing dashboard templates, you need to consider how you want your data to be presented. Answering this question is done by populating the dashboard with the different widgets available to you. The dashboard is built up in rows which can hold a number of widgets depending on their sizes. Each row has an add widget button in its lower left corner, and a counter that shows you how many percent of the row has been occupied with widgets.
Click Add widget to bring out the widget toolbox, which holds all the different widgets at your disposal for setting up the dashboard.
Set up the right order. By drop and drag you can edit both the order of rows and widgets. The + and – buttons in the toolbar allows you to alter the size the of the widget.
Edit the title of the widget, if you wish. When hovering your mouse over the title, a small edit icon will appear – click the title to rename the widget.
Note: Widgets are designed to be flexible in their width – meaning they will scale up and down, based on their %-size, according to the size of screen they’re displayed in. Their height is based upon the highest widget in the row. This is not reflected directly in the dashboard designer but is visible for the end-user when using the dashboard. This means that widgets such as the “Profile Picture”, which has a static height, might get a lot of blank space added if placed next to the “Assignments” widget, which holds a list of assignments.
Step 3: Set up filters
Filters are a convenient way to make a template of views on the dashboard which are frequently used, and allow you to easily switch between them. This could for example be a “Week to date” filter which changes the relevant widgets to report for the current week, while another filter “Month to date” switches the same widgets to report only for the current month.
All filters are saved individually, so the different filters on the widgets can be mixed and matched any way you want.
The widget’s title gets saved as part of a filter, so you can have the individual widgets communicate through their title what they show.
Most widgets will show some kind of data by default, but some also need to have a minimum of filters applied before they are functional – for example the “Average score by page” widget.
You find all the settings available for any given widget at the top.
Difference between “Personal” and “Organization” filters
An important thing to note about filters is that they exist in two different contexts. We have the notion of Organization and Personal filters.
Organization filters are defined by the dashboard administrator and can be distributed with a dashboard template. These filters are available to all users who has access to the dashboard. They are owned by the administrators and they cannot be changed nor deleted by the end-user.
Personal filters are those created by the end-user on a dashboard they have access to. They are only visible to the user who creates it and on the dashboard where it was created.
The two different kinds of filters are easily distinguishable from the filter list as they are held under their own header. When creating a new filter as an end-user, only the personal list gets populated.
Warning: When setting up filters as an administrator, you might have access to more data than your end users. While you, as an administrator, might be able to create a filter which counts the number of completed checklists in the location group “Area 1”, only users who also have access to results within that location group will be able to get any sort of results from it. The organization filter will still be shown to the end-user. This is a significant caveat the dashboard administrator needs to be aware of.