Creating a Dashboard

New dashboards default to Blank, but you also have the option to automatically add widgets for each KPI in the organization. This can be a great starting point for building KPI dashboards.

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In this example, we’ve selected speedometers, and when you click “create,” the new dashboard starts with a speedometer for every KPI in the organization.

This is what the dashboard would have looked like if we had chosen bubbles.

Adding Widgets

To add a widget, click the Add Widget button in the button row.

This shows the Add Widget menu, where you can choose what you want to add to your dashboard.

Each type of widget has unique configuration options, many of which are discussed in separate articles.

Arranging Widgets

Editing a dashboard is a lot like editing a PowerPoint slide. You can drag and resize dashboard widgets to create any layout you want. See the Widget Spacing, Alignment, and Sizing article for more information.

Automatically Resizing Canvas

Your dashboard canvas will automatically expand as wide as you want it to be. For example, we can start dragging this chart here:

And then watch the canvas grow as we drag it away from the pie chart.

When you're viewing your dashboard, the size of your canvas doesn't matter. Spider Impact automatically zooms the dashboard so that it fits on screen. This is a lot like how PowerPoint presentations never have scroll bars during the presentation, but they do when editing.

Here we've made the browser very short and the dashboard resizes to fit.

Of course you can always click on the space around the dashboard to zoom in. Clicking again will zoom you back out.

Aspect Ratio

By default, dashboards automatically adjust in both height and width based on where you place widgets.

If you choose an aspect ratio of “Widescreen (16:9)” or “Standard (4:3)”, however, the dashboard canvas continues to adjust in size based on your widget placement, but its overall height to width proportions are locked in place. As you drag widgets to expand the dashboard, both dimensions adjust proportionally to preserve your chosen aspect ratio. Here we’ve chosen Widescreen and now see empty space on the right of the dashboard.

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This eliminates the trial-and-error process of creating dashboards for specific presentation formats. We’re able to quickly rearrange our widgets to best take advantage of this specific aspect ratio.

And when we export to PowerPoint, our dashboard fits perfectly on a widescreen PowerPoint slide without any empty space around the edges.

Font Size Appearance

An interesting side-effect of automatic dashboard sizing is that you can universally make all text on dashboards appear larger or smaller by changing the overall size of the dashboard while keeping its general layout the same. For example, here’s a dashboard where the pie chart labels look too small.

Here’s what the dashboard looks like when we edit it.

To fix the problem, we’re going to resize each widget to be smaller, reduce the font size of text widgets, and move widgets closer to each other. We’ll keep the general dashboard layout the same and just make everything smaller and closer.

Now when we view the dashboard, the pie chart labels are much easier to read. That’s because the labels stayed the same size while everything else became much smaller.

For reference, this is what we started with.

Font face

To change the font, open the dashboard Setting and select the "Dashboard Font" submenu. The selected font applies to all dashboard content including widget text, chart labels, and data values.

Available fonts include:

Sans-serif: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Tahoma, Source Sans Pro, Inter
Serif: Times New Roman, Georgia
Monospace: Courier New

Automatic Ordering

Spider Impact automatically puts smaller dashboard widgets on top of larger dashboard widgets, completely avoiding the "move forward" and "move back" hassles seen in other software. For example, if you put small performance bubbles on top of a chart, they'll be above the chart so you can see them.

If we resize these exact same widgets and put the chart over one of the bubbles, however, the chart is now on top.

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Keeping smaller widgets on top of larger widgets works great the vast majority of the time. If you're doing very complex layouts, however, there are times when you want to force a widget to the top.

In this example, we have an award image that we want to cover several smaller bubble widgets. Spider Impact is bringing the smaller bubble widgets to the front, though.

To force the award image to the top, we're going to turn on the "Keep in Front" toggle in the widget's configuration menu.

Rotating Widgets

Text, Image, Shape, Bubble, and Value widgets can be rotated using their rotation handles.

Locking Widgets

Because dashboards automatically put larger widgets underneath smaller widgets, you can upload a large background image and your smaller widgets will appear on top of it.

If you aren’t careful, however, you can accidentally move your background image as you’re editing other widgets. To solve this problem, just select the background image and turn on "Lock".

Not only does locking a widget prevent it from moving, but it also prevents it from being selected along with other widgets. So, when the background image is locked, you can drag to select all of the widgets on top of it without selecting the background image itself.

Please see the Dashboard and Strategy Map Backgrounds article for more information about all of the ways you can make dashboards even better with background images.

Clicking on widgets to drill to other screens

By default, many dashboard widgets have default drilldown targets. For example, clicking on a speedometer that's showing KPI data will take you to that KPIs Overview tab, and clicking on a single value widget that's showing a Dataset value will take you to that dataset's Explore tab with that widget's filters applied.

You can override this default click behavior for most dashboard widgets by choosing the Drilldown option in their Edit Widget menu.

This allows you to choose virtually any item in the software to drill to. Here we're drilling to a Solar Projects report when clicking on a single value widget.

Automatically applying dataset filters on drilldown

Single value widgets and dataset table widgets have even more powerful drilldown behavior. If you choose to drill to a report or dashboard that's showing data from the same dataset as the widget being clicked, the filters behind that number that you click on will be automatically applied to the destination report or dashboard.

For example, here we've set a custom drilldown on "Solar Projects" number that will take us to the "Solar Projects" report. Now when viewing the dashboard with a filter set to show only "Abundant Solar Power Inc" as the contractor, we see there are 10 solar projects for that contractor.

When we click on that "10" number to drill down, the report automatically applies the same contractor filter, showing only those 10 solar projects—no manual filtering required. This allows us to create a single detail report that automatically updates based on what you click to get to that report.

This automatic filter transfer works identically when drilling down to dashboards. Whether your custom drilldown targets a report or a dashboard, the filters that created the value you clicked will be automatically applied to your destination.

Dataset filters are transferred only when the target report or dashboard uses the same underlying dataset as the widget you clicked. Filters within calculated value equations are not transferred.