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Dashboards: the numbers you check every morning
Most people have a handful of numbers they check without being asked. How many applications came in this week. How many lessons went undelivered. How much is outstanding. What is sitting in the waiting list.
Checking them means going and looking, which means remembering to. A dashboard is the version where you do not have to.
What a dashboard is made of
Three pieces, and it is worth knowing which is which, because the naming matters when you come to build one.
A Dashboard Item is a saved view of a query's results — its columns, its chosen shape, and fixed values for its parameters. This is the content.
A Dashboard is the page itself. It holds no data.
A Part is one item placed on one dashboard, at a size and position. The same item can sit on more than one dashboard, so a figure the whole service watches does not have to be rebuilt for each person.
Building one
Dashboard Items are made from a query, not from the dashboard screen. Run a query, set the results up how you want them — grouped, pivoted, charted, whatever suits — then Save as Dashboard Item.
The key difference from a report: a Dashboard Item's parameters are fixed when you save it. It does not ask again. That is what lets it sit on a page and update quietly rather than stopping to prompt somebody.
Then on a dashboard, + Add Part offers the items you have saved, and drops one onto the canvas.
Each tile renders whatever shape it was saved as. Save from the Visual tab and you get a chart; save from Group By and you get a summarised table.
Arranging it
Tiles drag and resize freely on a grid, and the layout saves as you go. Put the things you look at first at the top; make the chart you actually read big and the count you glance at small.
Keeping it current
Each tile has its own refresh. Leave it manual, or set it to update every 30 seconds, minute, 5 minutes or 15 minutes. There is a Refresh All for the whole page.
Choose intervals deliberately. Something that changes through the day — payments in, applications arriving — earns a short interval. A termly figure does not need to refresh every thirty seconds, and it costs nothing to leave it manual.
Outside those intervals, a tile holds its data until refreshed. It is not a live feed and does not pretend to be.
More than one, and sharing
You can have several dashboards, shown as tabs across the top, with one marked as your primary so it opens automatically.
That suits keeping them separate by purpose — a daily operational one, a finance one you look at monthly, a start-of-term one that matters for three weeks a year.
Dashboards can be shared, and + Add Existing puts somebody else's onto your own tab strip without you rebuilding it. If your service has a view everyone should be watching, build it once and let people add it.
Removing one from your tabs only affects you — it does not delete it for anybody else. A shared dashboard from elsewhere is read-only, so you cannot accidentally rearrange a colleague's work.
Where to start
Pick one number. The one you have caught yourself looking up twice this week.
Find or write the query behind it, save it as a Dashboard Item, and put it on a dashboard. Then add the next one. A dashboard that shows four things you genuinely act on is worth considerably more than one showing twenty you scroll past.