Editing Your Dashboard

The Dashboard tab is where you’ll preview your dashboard, add new components and adjust the properties of each component. This article covers what you need to know about using different components of the dashboards as well as information about automatic repairs for dashboard components.

• Canvases
• Sections
• Widgets
• Undo/Redo
• Repairs

Canvases

Canvases act as the pages of a dashboard. Depending on the contents and purpose of the dashboard, it may have one or many canvases. Canvas tabs are displayed along the top of a canvas and represent the canvases in your dashboard. You can click on a tab to open the corresponding canvas. This is useful when navigating between canvases in your dashboard. Each canvas should only be as large as the screen you expect readers to view it on. The value of the dashboard to a reader is reduced if they need to scroll to view all the content.

Use the general properties of the sidebar to add descriptive information for your canvas. You can also add static informational content to your canvas using the instructions properties of the sidebar. If you have a logo image that you’d like to use to customize the canvas further, you can use the logo properties of each canvas to add a logo.

Sections

Use sections to divide and organize each canvas. A canvas must have at least one section and may have as many sections as you need. Readers shouldn’t need to scroll to view all dashboard sections, but it is a good idea to use a section for each topic area of your canvas. If a topic is too large for a single section, consider making it its own canvas.

Use the general properties of the sidebar to add descriptive information for your section. You can also add static informational content to your section using the instructions properties of the sidebar. Use the section properties to decide if a section should be collapsible by the reader. You are also able to adjust the section width basis here. Each section can be customized for printing purposes too, using the printing properties of the sidebar.

You can duplicate, delete and move sections between canvases. These icons appear in the sidebar and above the selected section. If you are moving a section from one canvas into another, you can select where to position it in the new canvas.  Once moved, the section will keep all of its settings. Any widgets contained within the section will also move with the section to the new canvas.

Widgets

Widgets are the interactive components of your dashboard. You can add widgets into each section and connect them to your data sources and display your data. There are 13 widgets in the current version of the dashboard builder:

• Date picker widget: choose a date from a calendar pop-up.
• Select box widget: choose a text string from a drop-down menu.
• Tile widget: view a tile containing a single value.
• Table widget: view a simple, tabular report.
• XY scatter chart widget: view data plotted against X and Y-axes.
• Time series chart widget: view data plotted against a time line.
• Categorical chart widget: view data plotted against a categorical X-axis.
• Radar chart widget: view data from several different variables in a radar chart.
• Matrix widget: view a tabular report with defined fields for the columns, rows and values.
• Pie and donut chart widget: view categorical data in pie or donut chart format.
• Aggregation table widget: choose how you want to generate rows, then add as many columns as you need and filter or aggregate each column separately.
• Content widget widget: add blocks of text and images then adjust the text size, style, color and alignment as well as add bullet points or numbered lists. To supplement your written content, add links, tables, images, block quotes and horizontal rules.
• Periodization diagram widget: plot and visualize spans across time, for example, when you want to visualize a season plan or tournament schedule.

Use the general properties of the sidebar to add descriptive information for your widget. You can also add static informational content to your widget using the instructions properties of the sidebar.

You can also duplicate, delete and move widgets between canvases. These icons appear in the sidebar and above the selected widget. When moving the widget from one canvas into another, you can select the section of the new canvas that the widget will move into. The widget will keep all of its settings once moved into the new canvas. This includes the data it displays, any conditional formatting and advanced properties.

For more information about adding and editing widgets, read the article on adding a widget.

Undo/Redo

When editing your dashboard, you can undo and redo up to 100 actions by clicking on the buttons in the top right of the dashboard builder, or by using the following keyboard shortcuts:

• For Mac: Cmd+Z to undo and Shift+Cmd+Z to redo.
• For Windows: Ctrl+Z to undo and Ctrl+Y to redo.

You can undo and redo actions even after publishing or saving your dashboard as a draft. This allows you to experiment with various dashboard builder features, knowing that you can quickly reverse a potentially time-consuming mistake.

Repairs

Occasionally, a dashboard might have errors that prevent the components in the dashboard from working as intended (like missing properties or broken filters). When this occurs, the dashboard builder will attempt to automatically repair your dashboard and you’ll see a repair message next time you open the dashboard.

If you see a message saying your dashboard has been automatically repaired, you can view the fixes that have been made.