Getting to Know the Widget Editor

If you have been using ReportPlus, you know how easy it is to create dashboards with any number of data sources. ReportPlus is built by user experience experts and made for business users. It has a familiar drag and drop experience, it is simple to create or edit your visualizations to tell your story within minutes. However, data can be a little overwhelming to some, and visualizations are a big help. Today we are going to walk through the widget editor step by step.  

When you come into the editor, you will see three panels. The left side panel is where you will find all the available fields for the data source you are working with. Depending on which data source that is you will either have a flat list of fields or one broken up into metrics and dimensions.

                               

Flat fields from Excel                           Metrics & Dimensions from Cube

All of these fields are available for you to be dragging and dropping into the pivot panel to start creating your visualization. In this panel, you will find a section for filters, columns, rows, and values.

Using a sample set of marketing data from an excel file you can see in the image below that dragging the Date that emails were sent in field into the rows columns will populate the dates down the first line, the category of those fields become columns, the values populated are the sum of opened emails, and there is a local filter about the grid that allows you to quickly filter while in view mode.

Clicking on any of the fields that you bring over to the pivot panel unlocks additional options for these fields such as whether you want:

• Your dates displayed as days, months or years
• To filer by a rule (Year to date, Month to date, Last 7 Days, etc.)
• To change the label of the field as it appears in your visualization
• Change the sorting of the fields
• To change the formatting of your values to have commas, decimals, and more

                                                            

Moving over to the left-hand panel is where you will choose from over 30 different visualization types to visualize your data how you like.

After you have your visualization, you can change some different chart aspects in the chart settings. You can change styles of your table, bounds to your gauges, the color of your variables, add Trendlines, configure your axis, and so much more. The additional tabs on the bottom of the visualization panel will also unlock a number of additional features.

Parameters allow you to manually select the parameters of your data from the source. For example, you may not want to pull in an entire excel sheet and only pull in two columns.

Binding widget data to a dashboard filter can be done in two ways: either as part of the Dashboard Filter configuration or in the Dashboard Filters Binding section. The binding is defined by adding rules that link a field in the dashboard filter data set with a corresponding field in the widget’s data set. For more information on the dashboard, filtering visit the dashboard filters and binding section of our documentation.

The actions tab of the editor allows you to link visualizations to other dashboards or a URL by events such as maximizing a widget, clicking on a grid, or clicking on a chart/column bar. This feature takes the concept of drill-down navigation to a new level; for instance, if you want to provide more detail on the information displayed, you can use a whole new dashboard. For more information on dashboard linking visit the Navigation between Dashboards section of our documentation.

The general tab of this panel allows you to rename the title of the visualization, decided whether you want to show a title or not and gives you the data source and path to that source.

Interested in building your own dashboards? Download a free trial of any of our ReportPlus platforms now, or contact us to see the wonders it can do for your team’s productivity!