One Widget, Many Appearances

Single-value widgets can show data from any source (including no source) with display options that are incredibly flexible. This single widget appears as four different options in the Add Widget menu:

• Shape
• Scorecard Bubble
• Initiative Bubble
• Dataset Value

This allows single-value widgets to be quickly added to dashboards with formatting options optimized for each data source.

These single value widgets can be used for a wide variety of purposes, from PowerPoint style layout shapes like the blue arrow box, to dynamically colored performance bubbles.

You can use them to show actual performance values too, both inside shapes and on their own.

You can even use single value widgets to create infographic-style dashboards, like this example where the dynamic number is always red in one place and always white in another.

Shapes

Just like with PowerPoint, you can add shapes and lines to dashboards.

Choosing “Shape” allows you to add one of 40 shapes to your dashboard.

These shape widgets can be resized, moved, and rotated.

Many shape widgets have additional yellow handles to further adjust their appearance. For example, the rounded rectangle shape has a yellow handle near its corner.

Dragging it horizontally changes its corner radius.

More complex shapes like this u-turn arrow have as many as three yellow handles.

Here we’ve modified the arrow to be narrow with sharp turns.

These new Shape widgets open the door to an entirely new category of data visualization that can closely match PowerPoint slides.

Setting fill, outline, and opacity

You have complete control over the appearance of the appearance of shape widgets. Here we’ve changed to a solid fill instead of gradient.

You can manually choose the fill color, outline color, and outline thickness.

You can even set the shape opacity, creating see-through objects or containers.

Setting and configuring text

You can choose to add text to shape widgets. You also have a variety of text formatting options including:

• Bold
• Italic
• Underline
• Align left, center, or right
• Font size

Text rotates along with the shapes, automatically snapping to 90 degree increments to maximize readability.

You can override this Auto text rotation, however, choosing static text rotation at 90 degree increments.

Setting data source

Shape widgets come alive when you wire them up to data.

In the Set Data Source menu you can change the shape’s data source from “None” to a scorecard, initiative, or dataset value. Here we’ve decided to use a dataset value: the average employee satisfaction survey result.

And, instead of showing a specific color, we’ll change this shape’s color to be conditional based on the dataset value. We’ve chosen a heat map color scheme with evenly-sized segments for customer satisfaction scores between 0 and 5.

We’ll also change the text on the shape from “Specific Text” to “Data Source”, which will show the customer satisfaction score from the dataset.

Finally, we’ll set the shape widget’s title to “Customer Satisfaction”.

When we’re done we have a dynamically colored shape that shows a dataset value.

When shape widgets are connected to data, the display options don’t stop there. Here we’ve turned off both the shape’s fill and outline, using the conditional color for the text.

Turning on the widget background displays our value exactly like the existing dataset single value widget, except the text is dynamically colored based on the value.

Finally, we’ll turn the background and title off, and choose a specific color for the text.

Statically colored values like this allow us to create infographics like shown above.

Trend Arrows

When a shape widget uses a scorecard item as its data source, there is the option to turn on a trend arrow to show how performance has changed since the previous period. This trend arrow is always placed in the upper left corner.