Dashboard And Widgets

The dashboard is an assembled summary page — a grid of small panels called widgets, each showing a number, a chart, a short list of records, a shortcut or a piece of text. It is the page most people land on when they sign in, and it is the fastest way to see where things stand without opening a single list.

What This Is

A dashboard is not a screen someone at your company designed once and froze. It is built out of widgets, and each widget is a small assembled panel that your administrator created and published to particular roles. Put together, they give you a starting view of your work.

Two things follow from that, and they explain most of what is confusing about dashboards:

• You did not choose the widgets that exist. They have to be built and published for you. If a figure you want is not on the dashboard, you cannot conjure it up yourself — someone has to build it first. See Asking For A New Widget.
• You may be able to choose which of the available widgets you use, and how they are arranged, if your administrator granted you that permission. Many people are not given it.

The dashboard page has a heading of Dashboard. If your application uses the side navigation, a house icon labeled Dashboard sits at the top of it — but only if you are allowed to use a dashboard at all. The page itself has no filter bar, no search box and no page-level refresh button. Each widget supplies its own contents, together with whatever frame and heading it was built with.

Note on labels. Almost everything on a dashboard — widget headings, column names, the words on buttons inside a widget — is written by whoever built the widget. This chapter names only the controls that are part of the application itself. Everything else will read the way your application words it.

Why It Matters

A dashboard answers "what should I look at today" before you have to decide which list to open. Used well, it replaces a morning routine of opening five list screens and applying the same filters each time.

Typical uses:

• A daily working view: today's tasks, overdue items, anything waiting on you.
• A management summary: totals for the month, a trend chart, a breakdown by team or region.
• A launchpad: buttons and links to the handful of screens and actions you use constantly.
• A status board: a short list of the most recent records of some kind, so you notice new arrivals.

Where You Land When You Sign In

Not everyone gets a dashboard. Where you arrive after signing in — and where the home link in the navigation and the logo take you — depends on how your account is set up. There are three possible outcomes.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• The home link does not always open the dashboard. The Dashboard item in the side navigation appears only if you are allowed to use a dashboard, and its label stays the same whatever it points at. If your account has a landing module, that item — and the logo — take you to that module every time, and there is no other way back to the dashboard page.
• If you have no dashboard permission, there is no way to turn one on yourself. The Module selection page is what you get. If it is empty, it says "No modules available" with the message "There are currently no modules available for use. Please check your permissions or contact your system administrator." — which is exactly what to do.

Example. Two colleagues in the same team compare screens. Dana signs in and sees a dashboard with four widgets. Marek signs in and lands directly on the Orders list. Neither is broken: Marek's account has Orders set as his landing module, because he spends the whole day in it. If Marek wants the dashboard as well, only an administrator can change that — the setting is not on his profile page.

The Kinds Of Widget You May Meet

There is no fixed catalog of widget types. A widget is assembled from parts, so what you actually meet depends entirely on what was built for your application. In practice they fall into a handful of recognizable shapes.

Counters And Single Figures

A card with one large number and a caption: Open tickets — 47. Sometimes several figures sit side by side in one widget.

Good for: a value you check constantly and act on when it crosses a threshold. Counts of open items, totals for the current month, how many things are waiting on you.

Watch for: the number is only as precise as its definition. "Open tickets" might mean not yet closed, or not yet closed and assigned to me, or not yet closed and created this month. If two people disagree about a figure, the definition is usually the reason — ask what the widget counts.

Charts

A bar, line, area, pie, doughnut, radar or polar-area chart drawn from a set of records. See Reading Charts below for what you can and cannot do with one.

Good for: shape and comparison — is this month better than last, which category dominates, is the trend up or down.

Not good for: exact values. Read a chart to see the pattern, then open the list if you need figures you will quote.

Lists Of Records

An embedded list: the same rows you would see on a full list screen, cut down to fit a panel. It can use any of the layouts a list screen supports — a table, cards, a simple list, a board, a calendar, a file list. It may have its own heading, its own icon, an Add button, and filter controls, depending on how it was built. If it has nothing to show, it displays a short "no data" message rather than a blank space; the wording of that message is set when the widget is built.

Good for: a short working queue — the five oldest unassigned tickets, this week's deliveries, records you created that are still drafts.

Everything you know about list screens applies inside the panel: sorting, paging, opening a row. See List Screens. Paging or filtering inside an embedded list re-fetches that list only; the rest of the dashboard is untouched.

Calendars

A month, week or day view embedded in a panel, showing records that carry dates. The controls behave the same way as a full calendar screen — see Calendars.

Good for: what is happening this week, at a glance, without leaving the summary page.

Watch for: a calendar needs vertical space. In a narrow widget it is often more legible as a list of upcoming events than as a grid — that is a choice made when the widget is built, and worth requesting if the calendar is cramped.

Text, Headings And Links

Static content: a short set of instructions, a policy reminder, a link to an internal document, a row of buttons that jump to a screen, open a record, open a pop-up window, or run an action.

Good for: onboarding notes, links to things that live outside the application, and shortcuts to the two or three screens you use every hour.

Watch for: a button in a widget can run a real action on real data. Read the label before you press it; there is no undo anywhere in the application.

Forms

A widget can contain a working form — for example a quick "log a call" box that creates a record without leaving the dashboard. It behaves like any other form: required fields, validation, a save button. See Creating And Editing Records.

Embedded Content

A widget can hold content from elsewhere: a video, a map, a report from another system, a page from your intranet. What you can do inside it is decided by whatever is embedded, not by this application.

Watch for: embedded content usually needs its own network access and sometimes its own sign-in. If a panel is permanently blank while everything else on the page works, embedded content is a likely culprit — report it rather than assuming it is empty.

Tabs And Sections Inside A Widget

A single widget can be divided into tabs, or into a card with a scrolling body. Switching tabs inside a widget is instant and does not reload the page.

The Clock

One widget is built in rather than assembled for your application: a small centered card showing today's date and the current time, with a thin bar along the bottom that fills over each minute. It appears in the widget chooser under the name Date & time.

It is worth knowing about for one reason: it is the only widget on the page that updates by itself. Everything around it is frozen at the moment the page loaded. A ticking clock next to a stale number is a genuinely misleading combination — see the next section.

Custom Widgets Built For Your Application

Anything else. Because widgets are assembled rather than picked from a menu, your application may have panels that fit none of the shapes above: a scorecard, a checklist, a progress ladder, a mixed panel with a figure, a chart and a list stacked together. If you cannot tell what a panel is showing, ask — the person who built it can describe it in one sentence.

Where The Numbers Come From

Every widget is filled in at the moment the page loads, by running its own question against your data. Nothing is precomputed overnight and nothing is cached from your last visit unless your administrator deliberately built it that way.

Widgets Show The Data You Are Allowed To See

This is the single most important thing to understand about dashboard figures. A widget's contents are gathered under your permissions. If you cannot see a record on a list screen, it is normally not counted in a widget either.

So two colleagues can open the same dashboard, look at the same widget with the same heading, and see different totals — and both are correct.

Example. The sales dashboard has a widget headed Open opportunities — value. Dana, a regional sales rep, sees €412,000. Her manager Petra sees €3.1M on the same widget. Nobody has made a mistake: Dana is allowed to see her own region's opportunities, Petra sees all of them. The widget asks the same question; the data it is allowed to read is different.

The trap is in the follow-up conversation. If Dana quotes "€412,000 in the pipeline" in a meeting without saying "in my region", the number sounds like a company figure. When you quote a dashboard number, quote the scope with it.

The same applies to a list widget: two people can see a different number of rows in it, and to a chart: the same chart can have different bar heights for different people.

A widget can also be deliberately built to show everything, regardless of who is looking, when the figure is meant to be a company-wide total. You cannot tell which kind you are looking at from the panel itself. If it matters — and for anything you report upward, it does — ask whether the widget is scoped to the viewer or to the whole company.

For the full picture of who sees what and why, see Roles, Groups And Permissions and Why Your Screen Differs.

You May Not Even Have The Same Widgets

Beyond the data inside a widget, the widget itself is published to particular roles. A colleague may have a panel on their dashboard that does not exist for you at all, and there is no placeholder or message telling you it is missing. If someone describes a widget you do not have, that is normal, and the fix is a request to your administrator rather than a search of your own settings.

Refreshing: Getting Current Figures

Widgets do not refresh themselves. Everything on the page is drawn once, when the page loads, and then stays exactly as it is until you load the page again. There is no automatic refresh interval, no refresh button for the dashboard as a whole, and nothing on the page tells you how old the figures are. An embedded list may carry the same refresh control a full list screen has, but that reloads only that one list.

The only exception is the Date & time widget, which keeps ticking. Ignore it as a freshness signal — the clock updating does not mean the numbers beside it did.

To get current figures, do one of these:

1. Reload the page in your browser (F5, Ctrl+R or Cmd+R). This is the reliable option.
2. Navigate away and back — click into a module and then back to the dashboard. The page is rebuilt, so the widgets are recalculated.

Interacting with a control inside a widget — turning a page in an embedded list, switching a tab, using a filter the widget offers — refreshes that widget's own contents. It does not touch the other widgets on the page.

Example. Tomáš leaves the dashboard open on a second monitor all morning as a "team board". At 09:00 it shows Unassigned tickets — 3. At 13:00 it still shows 3, and the clock widget says 13:04, so it looks live. It is not: eleven tickets have arrived since. Anything you keep open as a wall board needs a periodic reload; the page will never update on its own.

Records in general are not pushed to your screen live anywhere in the application. The exceptions are notifications and background export jobs, which are covered in Notifications And Alerts.

Editing Your Own Dashboard

If your administrator has granted you the matching permission, you can decide which of the widgets available to you appear on your dashboard, and how they are laid out. Many users do not have this permission, and if you do not, the control described here is simply absent — you see whatever layout your group is given.

Opening The Editor

On the dashboard, open the Actions dropdown at the top of the page (a chevron next to the page heading) and choose Edit. If there is no Actions dropdown on your dashboard, you do not have the permission.

The editor opens as a full-width page headed Edit Dashboard, split into two parts:

• Left: a panel headed Choose widgets, listing every widget available to you by name. Widgets already on your dashboard are tinted and carry a minus sign; the rest carry a plus sign. Above that list are the Save, Reset to default and Close buttons.
• Right: a working preview of your dashboard, with each widget drawn in a dashed outline.

On a narrow screen the left panel sits above the preview rather than beside it.

Choosing Widgets

Click a widget's name in the Choose widgets list to add it. Click it again to remove it. There is no separate delete control on the widget itself, and no confirmation — one click adds, the same click again removes.

A newly added widget always lands at the end of the layout, at its default width of about a third of the page.

Arranging Widgets

• Reorder: drag a widget in the preview to a new position. There is no dedicated grab handle — dragging anywhere inside the widget starts the move, which also means clicking around inside a widget in the editor can start a drag you did not intend. This works on touch screens too, though it is fiddly.
• Resize: drag the right edge of a widget. Width snaps to twelfths of the page, so a widget can be anywhere from a narrow sliver to the full width. There is no vertical resize — a widget is as tall as its content needs to be, and there is no corner handle.

On screens narrower than about 768 pixels every widget is drawn full width regardless of what you set here, so a layout tuned on a laptop will read as a single column on a phone.

Your Changes Are Held As A Draft

This is the part that catches people out.

Adding and removing widgets is recorded immediately — but into a draft, not into your live dashboard. The dashboard you and your colleagues actually see does not change until you press Save.

Two consequences:

• If you add widgets and then close the editor without saving, your real dashboard is unchanged. But when you reopen the editor, your drafted widgets are still there, which looks exactly like "I already saved this". The only proof that a change is live is the dashboard page itself.
• Reordering and resizing are not part of the draft. Order and width live only on screen until you press Save. Adding or removing a widget rebuilds the preview from the draft and silently discards any arranging you have done since the last save.

So work in this order:

1. Add and remove all the widgets you want first.
2. Then drag them into position and set their widths.
3. Then press Save.

When the save succeeds, a check mark appears on the Save button for about two seconds and the button becomes usable again. That tick means the layout was sent and stored — it is a timer, not a verification that everything on your dashboard works.

There is no unsaved-changes warning when you leave the editor with Close or the browser Back button. Nothing will stop you walking away from unsaved arranging.

Reset To Default

The Reset to default button discards your personal layout entirely and returns you to the layout your group is given.

It only appears when you have a personal layout to discard. If you have never saved a dashboard of your own, the button is not there, because there is nothing to reset. It also does not appear when an administrator is editing a group's shared dashboard.

Two things to know:

• Your personal layout permanently overrides the group's. The moment you save anything — even an empty layout — you stop inheriting the group dashboard. If your administrator later improves the group dashboard, you will not see the improvement until you reset.
• Reset gives you the group layout, not a factory default. If your group has no dashboard set up, resetting leaves you with a blank page.

Example. Jana customized her dashboard in March, removing two widgets she did not use. In September her manager announces "everyone now has the new margin chart on their dashboard". Everyone except Jana — she is on her own March layout and is not inheriting anything. She has two ways out: open Edit, add the margin chart from Choose widgets, arrange and Save (keeps her personal layout); or press Reset to default (gives up her customization and takes the group's layout, including anything else that changed since March). Either is fine; there is no way to merge them.

When A Widget Shows Nothing Or Looks Wrong

Widgets fail quietly. There is no error message inside a panel, which means "empty" and "broken" look identical. Here is how to read the symptoms.

Warning about vanished widgets. If a widget disappears from your dashboard because it was unpublished or deleted, and you then open the editor and press Save, the widget is dropped from your saved layout for good. If it comes back later, you will have to add it again. When a widget vanishes unexpectedly, ask before you re-save.

Occasionally a single misbehaving widget can affect the appearance or behavior of the whole dashboard page, not only its own panel. If the dashboard as a whole looks wrong while the rest of the application is fine, say which widgets are on it when you report the problem.

Reading Charts

Charts on a dashboard or an assembled page are drawn in your browser and support a small, fixed set of interactions. Knowing exactly what they do saves a lot of fruitless clicking.

What You Can Do

• Hover over a bar, point or slice to see a tooltip with the exact value and the series name. This is how you read a precise figure off a chart.
• Click an entry in the legend, when the chart has one, to hide that series or slice; click it again to bring it back. On a crowded chart this is the quickest way to compare two series without the others in the way. It changes only what you are looking at — it does not filter any data and it is not remembered when the page reloads.
• Resize the window. Charts stretch to the width available. Their height is fixed by whoever built them, so a chart does not get taller when you widen the browser.

What You Cannot Do

• There is no drill-down. Clicking a bar does not open the records behind it, and does not filter anything else on the page. If you need the underlying records, your administrator has to add a separate link or button beside the chart — some applications do exactly that. Ask for it if you need it.
• There is no chart download or export. No "save as image", no "export data". Take a screenshot, or export the underlying list from the list screen — see Action Buttons And Exporting.
• You cannot change the chart type, the colors, the legend position, the date range or the grouping. Every one of those is fixed when the chart is built. All of them are reasonable things to request.

Reading Them Honestly

• Check where the vertical axis starts. Charts commonly start at zero, but not always. A chart whose axis starts at 40 makes a rise from 42 to 46 look dramatic.
• Check whether bars are stacked. In a stacked chart the top of a bar is the total of the categories in it, not the value of the topmost category.
• Pie and doughnut charts hide small values. If several slices are tiny, hover to read them, or ask for the same data as a bar chart or a list.
• A chart shows the data you are allowed to see, exactly like every other widget. Do not compare your chart with a colleague's screenshot and assume one of them is broken.

Example. The Revenue by month bar chart shows a bar for November that looks about a third taller than October's. Petra hovers over both: October €148,200, November €161,900 — a 9% increase, not a third. The axis on that chart starts at €120,000. The chart was right; the eyeball reading was not. Hover before you quote.

Assembled Pages And Tabs

Not every entry in your navigation opens a list. Some open assembled pages — pages built the same way widgets are, out of headings, text, links, charts, embedded lists, calendars and forms. Your administrator may call these canvases.

They behave like a dashboard that someone else arranged and that you cannot rearrange: a fixed layout, no edit control, no personal version. You may meet them as a departmental landing page, a report page, a set of instructions with shortcuts, or a page that embeds another application.

Tabs

An assembled page — or a single widget — can be divided into tabs. Switching tabs is instant and does not reload the page.

The tab you were on is remembered. The active tab is recorded in the page's web address, which has three useful effects:

• If something on the page reloads part of itself, you stay on the tab you chose rather than being thrown back to the first one.
• Copying the address from your browser and sending it to a colleague sends them to the same tab. This is the supported way to point someone at a specific section of an assembled page.
• The browser Back button does not step back through tabs. It takes you to the previous page. Use the tabs themselves to move between sections.

One limit worth knowing: a fresh visit always starts on the first tab. The tab is remembered inside a visit and inside a shared link, not as a personal preference. If you always want to start on the third tab, bookmark the page while that tab is open.

Example. The Region overview page has tabs for Summary, Pipeline and Team. Marek is looking at Pipeline and wants his colleague to see the same thing. He copies the address from the browser and pastes it into a message. She opens it and lands on Pipeline, not on Summary. Had he just told her "open Region overview and click the second tab", she would have had to find it herself.

Assembled Pages In A Pop-Up Window

An action button on a record or a list can open an assembled page in a pop-up window rather than a full page — a summary sheet for one record, for example. It behaves the same way inside the pop-up. See Pop-Up Windows.

Asking For A New Widget

Widgets cannot be created from inside the application by a normal user. Every one of them has to be built and published by an administrator, and published specifically to the roles that should have it. So the practical skill is not clicking — it is writing a request that can be built without three rounds of clarification.

What A Useful Request Contains

A Weak Request And A Strong One

Weak:

Can we get a sales widget on the dashboard?

This cannot be built. It does not say what is measured, over what, for whom, or in what shape.

Strong:

Could we add a widget to the sales dashboard, please?

• Shape: a vertical bar chart, one bar per month, about half the page wide.
• What it measures: the total value of Orders, in euro, by the order date.
• Which records: Orders with status Confirmed or Delivered. Please exclude Canceled and Draft orders, and exclude internal test accounts.
• Period: the last 12 complete months, rolling — so the oldest bar drops off each month.
• Scope: each person should see their own region only, the same way the Open opportunities widget already works. Regional managers should see all regions in their area.
• Who gets it: the Sales rep and Sales manager roles.
• On click: if it is possible, a link under the chart to the Orders list filtered to the same 12 months, so we can check a figure. If that is not straightforward, leave it out.
• Why: we currently open the Orders list and apply the same filter every Monday to build this by hand.

The last line does more work than it looks like it does. Saying what you are trying to achieve lets the person building it tell you that an existing widget already answers the question, or that a slightly different chart answers it better.

Requests That Are Cheap To Grant

Some things are quick because the widget already exists and only needs adjusting. Worth asking for:

• Publishing an existing widget to your role, when a colleague has one you do not.
• Changing the chart type — a bar chart instead of a pie, a line instead of bars.
• Adding a link under a chart or figure to the list behind it.
• Widening or shortening an embedded list — five rows instead of twenty.
• Wording a "nothing to show" message so an empty panel does not look broken.
• Setting up a starting group layout, so new colleagues do not land on an empty dashboard.

See What To Ask Your Administrator For for how to phrase requests in general.

Tips And Gotchas

• Nothing on the dashboard is live. Reload the page before you read a number that matters. The ticking clock widget is not evidence that anything else is current.
• Quote the scope with the number. Widgets show what you are allowed to see; a figure without its scope is a figure that will be misquoted in a meeting.
• In the editor, choose first, arrange second, save last. Adding or removing a widget discards unsaved dragging and resizing.
• One click adds, the same click removes. There is no confirmation in the widget chooser.
• Closing the editor never warns you. Unsaved arranging is gone.
• Saving anything of your own stops you inheriting group changes. Improvements to the shared dashboard will pass you by until you press Reset to default.
• Reset takes you to your group's layout, which may be empty. It is not a factory default.
• A widget that vanished may come back. Ask before you re-save a layout without it, because saving drops it permanently.
• On a phone every widget is full width, whatever widths you set on a desktop.
• Hover a chart to read values. Clicking a bar does nothing.
• Copy the address bar to share the tab you are on in an assembled page.
• A small pencil icon in the top-right corner of a widget appears when you point at the widget, and only for people allowed to edit widgets. It opens an editing tool in a new browser tab — do not use it unless that is your job.

What To Ask Your Administrator For

You cannot change any of these yourself. Each is a one-line request.

• A dashboard at all, if you land on the Module selection tile page instead. The permission is described on their side as Access own Dashboard.
• Permission to arrange your own dashboard, if there is no Actions → Edit control. Their side calls it Edit own Dashboard.
• A starting layout for your group, so everyone in the team begins with the same useful set.
• An existing widget published to your role, when a colleague has one you do not.
• A new widget, using the checklist in Asking For A New Widget.
• Clarification of what a figure counts, and whether it is scoped to you or to the whole company.
• A landing module changed or removed, if the home link takes you somewhere you do not want. This lives on your user record and is not on your profile page.
• A link from a chart to its records, if you regularly need to check the figures behind it.

Related Chapters

• The Application Window
• Notifications And Alerts
• List Screens
• Roles, Groups And Permissions
• What To Ask Your Administrator For