Widgets are used to show data to your audience and let them interact with your dashboard.
- You can use the charting widgets (time series chart widget, categorical chart widget, XY scatter chart widget, radar chart widget and pie/donut chart widget) to plot data from the event forms you’ve added as data sources.
- To show readers specific information, you can use the tile widget.
- If you need to show a collection of data in tabular format, you can use the table widget, aggregation table widget or the matrix widget.
- To plot and visualize spans across time, you can use the periodization diagram widget.
- To add text or images that are not captured in an event form, you can use the content widget.
- The select box and date picker widgets are useful for letting your readers interact with your dashboard. Readers can use these to specify date ranges for the data that’s being displayed or to filter results based on their selections. You can read more about how to use these input widgets (select box widget, date picker widget) as filters for other widgets in the article on creating widget filters.
Steps to add a new widget to a dashboard
To add a new widget, follow the steps below.
- Select the Add widget button from your dashboard workspace.
- Choose which widget you’d like to add to your dashboard.
- Use the widget’s sidebar to adjust its appearance, content and behavior.
Customizing widget properties
Each widget has properties (found in the sidebar) that determine its appearance, content and behavior. To edit titles and subtitles, you can click on their text within the widget in the dashboard editor. This will automatically open the General properties section in the sidebar and the input fields will be focussed so you can add updated text straight away.
You can adjust the following properties for all widgets:
- Title: use a short and informative name to describe a widget.
- Subtitle: use this field to add further information or instructions for using the widget.
- Icon: add an icon to symbolize the data or purpose of the widget.
- Color: choose colors for your widget’s title, subtitle, icon, border and background.
- Width: use this to decide what proportion of the section the widget should occupy.
- Instructions: add richly formatted explanatory information or instructions to your widget.
- Data: all widgets, except the content widget, should be linked to one or more data sources.
- Aggregation table widget: use the categories properties to connect this widget to a data source for the purpose of creating rows for the first column. For additional columns, use the columns properties to connect a data source for each column.
- Categorical chart widget: use the series property to connect this widget to one or more data sources.
- Date picker widget: use the date range property to connect this widget to a data source.
- Matrix widget: use the data property to connect this widget to a data source.
- Periodization diagram widget: use the tracks properties to connect this widget to one or more data sources when using the event track type.
- Pie and donut chart widget: use the categories properties to connect this widget to a data source.
- Radar chart widget: use the data and series properties to connect this widget to a data source.
- Select box widget: use the options property to connect this widget to a data source.
- Table widget: use the table data property to connect this widget to a data source.
- Tile widget: use the tile value property to connect this widget to a data source.
- Time series chart widget: use the series property to connect this widget to one or more data sources.
- XY scatter chart widget: use the data property to connect this widget to a data source.