Starting a Briefing

Briefings are collections of pages from throughout Spider Impact. They allow you to run meetings from directly within the software.

To start a briefing, go to the Briefings section, select which briefing you want, and click Start.

All of the other controls in Spider Impact slide out and you're now in full-screen briefing mode. You can advance through slides using the controls in the upper left corner.

At any point in the briefing you can click on drill-down links in your slides. This will pause the briefing and take you to that section in Spider Impact, allowing you to answer questions on the fly using the live data in the software. The entire time the briefing is paused you'll see a bar on the top of the screen with links to stop or resume the briefing on the same slide you were on before.

Adding Briefing Slides

You can add slides to a briefing by clicking on the "Send to" button in the top menu bar and choosing Briefing.

This opens a dialog with three things to choose:

1. The slide name. This defaults to the name of the item you're adding.
2. A calendar period for the slide. We'll explain this more below.
3. Which briefing you want to add the slide to.

When you click Save, the slide will be added to your briefing.

Editing Slides

You can edit an individual slides in the briefing section by choosing the slide you want in the slide control on the top and then going to the Edit Slide tab.

The only things to edit here are the things we set up when creating the slide, its name and calendar period.

Editing a Briefing

To edit a briefing, click the Edit Briefing button on top.

Here you can delete slides, or drag and drop them to rearrange them.

Web Slides

When you're editing a briefing you can also add a Web Slide that shows content from external web pages or web apps that support embedding. This is similar to the embedded content dashboard widget, except that it's an entire briefing slide rather than a widget on a dashboard.

For example, here we're showing an embedded Google Doc that has meeting notes we want to review.

See the embedded content dashboard widget article for other embedding examples, like Power BI reports.

Briefing Slide Calendar Periods

Throughout the software, Spider Impact has a calendar period selector in the upper right corner that shows you the period for the data that you're viewing. It works the same in dashboards as it does everywhere else. If you click the name of the calendar period on top, you can choose to view another period.

You can choose which calendar periods to show for individual slides, however. In this example, we're changing the Key Measure History slide to show data from 1 period earlier.

During your briefing, you'll this this clearly labeled on the top of your briefing. You can still change the overall calendar period selector, of course, but it's also clear both the overall change you're making and how it will affect your slide.

Similarly, you can choose to show a specific calendar period.

And this is what it looks like during a briefing.