Build a Dashboard

Reports, Charts, Work Lists: everything all in one place. Project Insight Dashboards are the centralized screen for all your project work and metrics. #projectmanagement #portfoliomanagement #software

Transcript:

Today, we are going to walk through how to build a dashboard in Project Insight.

To go to the dashboard home, we'll navigate to the main menu dropdown on the top left and choose our second option called "Dashboard." If you have dashboards already saved or shared with you, similar to our reporting feature, there will be the names of those dashboards in a flyout menu on the right. To enter a dashboard, click on its name. If you don't have a dashboard already built in the system, you can click on "Dashboard" to start building your first one.

As you can see, this dashboard is built specifically for a department to see their reporting information, with their reports and charts listed out, whether in a list view or in a Gantt visual display. You can expand the tiles similar to the summary tasks in your task list. A dashboard is essentially a collection of reports contained within different tiles, all on one screen. The layout of these report tiles can be updated in the dashboard options on the top right.

The dashboard options reflect how these tiles can be arranged with each other, whether in one column at the top, three different columns, or different column configurations in the middle. You can set this up in various ways depending on the type of chart that you are displaying. Once you set up the report tiles as you like, you may also want to configure the different charting and reporting options from the available options.

In the charts section, you will see that there are quite a few different out-of-the-box charts available, and there are also up to eight reports that you can include from your saved reports in the system. Additionally, you can include up to eight web pages, which can function as links to any website. As you can see, you can have up to eight reports on one dashboard if you wish. To include a new report, click on the number, and you will be able to select a new report from your saved system.

If I go in here to select a new report, it will provide me with different options. These are all the saved reports that I have in my workspace, whether they were saved by me or shared with me by someone else. If I look down here, you can see I have quite a few different reports available to me. I can also include reports that are just charts as another option if you would like to view it from that perspective. I am going to go ahead and add a task report titled "Current and Overdue Tasks by Project Department." You can also specify the report height, which is sometimes helpful to see once you've added it.

After you've added the report, this is a smaller list of reports, so I might be able to make this a little bit shorter. In the tile settings, each tile has its own gear setting that allows me to adjust how tall I want it. For this one, I might set it around 300 pixels. You can see that this shrinks the report height, and some aspects are plug-and-play when setting up the height. For example, 300 pixels is a little shorter compared to maybe 500 pixels, which provides a bit more breathing room, especially if I want to expand the results by default.

Once you have set up the reports and charts you want, you will want to save the dashboard. After saving the dashboard, it will reload the page and display the name of the report in the header. Click on "Save Dashboard" to save your changes, ensuring that you don't accidentally override something unless you intend to. If you are not wanting to override an existing dashboard, make sure to click "Save as New Dashboard." If you do want to override it, you can leave it unchecked.

The "Include in Dashboard Menu" option will allow you to see this dashboard in the flyout menu we saw at the beginning. "System Default Dashboard" means that when you save this dashboard, it will be the automatic dashboard displayed when you click on the dashboard home.

Make sure to hit save whenever you make any changes; think of this just like a report. You can also share the dashboard with users, departments, companies, or groups if you have that add-on turned on. As with reports, when you hit save and share it out to the individuals you want to see it, they will see that dashboard appear in the flyout menu.

This has been an overview of using dashboards in Project Insight—a great way to share a collection of reports or charts all on one page.