Using the Dashboard App

The Dashboard is where your workspace reports on itself. You can build as many dashboards as you need, arrange them how you like, and give each audience its own — the finance dashboard for the treasurer, the call-sheet dashboard for the person making calls, the one-page summary for the boss.

Installing

Add Dashboard from the Apps marketplace. It adds a Dashboard item to your sidebar — most people put it at the top, since it's the natural landing page.

Who can do what

Two permissions govern the app. View dashboard (dashboard_view) lets a person open dashboards they've been offered. Manage Dashboard app (dashboard_manage) lets them create, arrange, configure, assign, and delete them. Everything described below under editing needs the manage permission; the rest is available to any viewer.

Getting started

A new workspace starts with a Home dashboard carrying the activity feed and the welcome card. From there you have two ways forward, both offered when the dashboard list is empty:

Create a dashboard — name it and start from nothing.
Start from examples — seeds three worked dashboards (Fundraising detail, Campaign manager, Candidate view) along with the saved views behind them. These are fully editable: open any widget and change it, or delete what you don't want. They're a starting point, not a fixed template.

Multiple dashboards

The dashboard name at the top left is a switcher. When you have more than one, it becomes a dropdown listing every dashboard you've been offered; with only one, it's just a label.

Everything to do with dashboards themselves lives under the Manage dropdown at the top right: New dashboard, Add widget, Rename, Audience, Scope filter, Export, and Delete. Deleting takes every widget on that dashboard with it, and anyone it was assigned to loses it, so the confirmation names the dashboard before it goes.

Arranging a dashboard

The pencil icon at the top right enters edit mode. A dashboard is built from rows, and each row is split into columns:

Full width, Halves, Two-thirds + third, Third + two-thirds, Thirds, or Quarters. Pick the split when you add a row, and change it any time from the row's own dropdown.
Drag widgets by the grip handle — within a column, or across to another column or row.
Reorder rows with the up and down arrows; remove a row with the trash icon. Removing a row that still holds widgets doesn't delete them — they move to a new full-width row.
Add widget appears as a dashed slot inside every column, so you add a widget where you want it rather than adding it and then moving it.

Save with the disk icon, or discard everything you've moved with the X. Nothing is written until you save.

The mobile layout

Edit mode has a Desktop / Mobile toggle. Phones render one column, so the mobile layout is a straight top-to-bottom order — you're choosing what a phone shows first, not splitting columns. You edit it inside a phone-width frame so you can see it. If you never touch it, phones simply stack the desktop layout, and Reset mobile layout in the Manage menu drops a mobile arrangement you no longer want.

Add widget opens the library. Three kinds of thing live there:

A metric — a number, list, table or chart built from a saved view. This opens the widget builder, which has its own article: Building Dashboard Metrics.
Built-in widgets — the Welcome card (the greeting and product tour), the Activity feed (log an activity, and see what the workspace has been doing), and Dashboard tips. These need no configuration and are added in one click. One of each per dashboard.
App widgets — installed apps that contribute a dashboard widget appear here too, and arrange exactly like everything else.

Built-in and app widgets can be removed and re-added freely; removing a metric widget takes the tile off this dashboard and leaves its saved view alone.

Who sees a dashboard

Manage > Audience decides who is offered a dashboard. Tick roles, people, or both. Tick opens first next to a role or a person to make this the dashboard they land on.

Two things worth knowing:

Nobody ticked means everyone. A dashboard with no audience assigned is offered to the whole workspace. That's the opposite of what a permissions-shaped screen usually means, so it's stated on the panel too.
Audience is curation, not access. It never widens what anyone can read. Every figure is still calculated with the viewer's own permissions, so someone assigned a dashboard they don't have the underlying access for sees "not available to you" where a number would be — not the number.

Which dashboard opens on arrival is resolved most-specific-first: a dashboard that names you personally, then one that names your role, then the workspace default, then simply the first one you can see. Delete somebody's default and they fall back down that list cleanly.

The scope filter

Manage > Scope filter turns one List (select) custom field — "Reporting period", say — into a selector at the top of the dashboard for every viewer. Choosing a value re-scopes every widget built on that kind of record, live, without editing a single saved view. It's the difference between building four quarterly dashboards and building one.

Two caveats the screen also tells you:

Only List (select) fields can be used, because their allowed values come from the field definition. If your workspace has none, add one under Settings > Custom Fields first.
A custom field belongs to either contacts or activity. Widgets built on the other kind of record stay unfiltered, and say so with a "Not filtered by …" badge, rather than quietly showing an unscoped number next to scoped ones.

The selection is deliberately temporary — the dashboard loads unscoped every time, so a scope you picked this morning isn't silently still applied tomorrow.

Drilling in

Every widget has a Full report link, metrics and charts included. It opens the underlying records in the Contacts or Activity grid with the widget's view selected — and narrowed to exactly the figure you clicked, including the bar you clicked on a chart and whatever the scope selector was set to. The number and the list you land on always reconcile.

This is navigation, not a shortcut around permissions: the destination grid applies your own access the same way it always does.

Exporting

Manage > Export builds a report of the whole dashboard, ready to print. It carries your workspace name, the dashboard name, the reporting period, and the generation date, so it reads as a document rather than a screenshot.

Print / Save as PDF uses your browser's print dialog. The button waits until every chart has finished drawing, so you can't print a page of empty plot frames.
CSV downloads the underlying figures.

The report prints on white whatever theme you're using, and each period-constrained widget prints its own period — a report mixing constrained and unconstrained figures says "varies by widget" rather than claiming a period it doesn't have.

What you see is what you can read

A dashboard is shared, but its numbers are not pre-computed. Every widget is calculated when you open it, under your own permissions — so two people on different roles can look at the same dashboard and correctly see different figures, and a widget over records you can't read says so rather than showing a number you weren't meant to have.