Creating Digital Boardroom Dashboards

Create a modern, exploratory, corporate steering dashboard.

Topic Sections

Use Digital Boardroom dashboards to create freeform topics to match your business organization, then add and combine pages from any story.

Create a New Dashboard

From the side navigation, select (Digital Boardroom), then choose Dashboard () in the Create New section.
Enter a name in the Create Digital Boardroom Presentation dialog and choose OK.
Enter a title for the root topic.

The root topic is the starting topic your presentation begins from. This topic can't be deleted. Populate this topic with a story page that works well as an introduction to the dashboard presentation, such as a business overview, or visuals showing the structure of the presentation.
Choose Design and open the Build panel. Enter a title and description presentation properties.

(Optional) Set the Mobile enabled option if you want this presentation to be available on the mobile app.
Choose to save your changes.

Import a Story

The content for your dashboard comes from story pages containing the visualizations and data you want to present. Let's import a story into this presentation.

Choose Library to open the Stories panel.
Choose (Import) from the Stories panel.
Select one or more stories from the Import Stories dialog and choose Import.
Note

Only responsive and canvas page types in a story are imported.

Imported stories are arranged as page bundles in the Stories panel and can be expanded to see the pages inside.

Individual story pages can be shown or hidden using the Expand and Collapse button.

Once you have an imported story, it's time to build the structure.

Add Story Pages to Dashboard Topics

Each topic in a Digital Boardroom dashboard can have one or more story pages associated with it. To start, let's fill the root topic with a single story page.

Tip

An overview page makes a good starting point for a dashboard-style presentation. An overview allows you to show views of high-level KPIs, and you can add jump points to other pages for a deeper dive.

From the Stories panel, drag-and-drop a story page onto the root topic square.

Topics are not limited to single story pages. You can drag an entire story or multi-select a subset of story pages and drag them all into a single topic to be displayed together. Limit the number of story pages to 20 or less to avoid overloading the topic.

In addition to selecting multiple pages (shown above), you can also drag the entire "Boardroom Meeting" story to add all the pages at once.

After adding pages to a topic, you can change the order they are displayed within the topic using a drag-and-drop approach, or even drag them to other existing topics on the canvas. To help you keep track of everything, the Stories panel indicates what story pages are already used on the Digital Boardroom canvas with the icon. Select to see a list of topics the page is used in. Choosing a topic centers that topic on the canvas:

At the top of the Stories panel, select and choose Used stories or Unused stories to filter your view of stories displayed in the panel.

Note

When presenting topics with multiple pages in the Digital Boardroom, the display of the story pages is determined by the lane settings of the Preferences option in the context menu.

Add More Topics with Navigation

With the root topic established, you can now start to build out your dashboard. By adding topics to the canvas, either connected in a parent-child relationship, or free-floating and accessible by navigation links, you create a navigation flow for possible exploration.

Tip

Wherever possible, create topics as connected children to other topics for easier navigation. To view a list of all child topics, select a parent topic on the canvas and then expand the Topic Structure section of the Build panel. You can change the order by clicking and dragging a child to a new position.

Use free-floating topics and navigation links for content that you may cover optionally.

To add a child topic to an existing parent:

Click (Add Topic) under your root topic to add a connected, empty topic.

When presenting, topics connected as children to parents will follow as the next topic using standard navigation options.

To add a free-floating topic (no parent):

Choose New Topic from the Insert section of the toolbar.

Since this topic is not connected to a default navigation hierarchy, you can manually add a direct link (jump target) from story pages for navigation purposes.

Note

In addition to creating new topics, you can also import topics from other dashboards. Choose Start of the navigation path

Select existing End of the navigation path

and select one or more topics from an existing dashboard. Select Live link for the topics to be updated automatically when the source dashboard changes.

To add a direct link from a story page or tile (jump target):

Choose (Navigation) from the Tools section of the toolbar.

The Navigation panel is displayed.
Select a story page on the canvas.
Under the Page heading, choose + Add Jump Target. Use the canvas to select the story page to link to.

OR

Under the Tile heading, choose (New jump point). In the dialog, select a tile, and choose Add. Use the canvas to select the story page to link to. If you selected a chart or table as the jump point and a different topic as the target, you can also select Apply selected dimension as a filter. With this setting, a presenter can jump to the target and simultaneously apply the selected value as a story filter.

Note
Jumping to a target from a value in a table or chart is not supported on mobile devices.

You can change the labels for jump links afterward from the Navigation panel. These labels can help the presenter determine the target of the link.

When presenting that particular page, the link is available by right-clicking the page or individual tile with the link to open the context menu, and choosing Jump to.... For image, shape, text, and header tiles with jump links, you can also left click the tile to navigate directly to the target, or to pick the target if there are more than one.

The label you used for the link is displayed. Select the link to jump to that new page.

For links with a filter, select the values you want to filter and choose from the menu that appears.

You can also mark a few important topics as featured to provide quick access to them during the presentation. Select Start of the navigation path Next navigation step Add as featured End of the navigation path to do so.

Simplify the Canvas View

Your dashboard can get very busy after you add multiple topics and story pages to the canvas. There are several ways you can simplify your view of the canvas to get a better picture of the overall dashboard:

Condense individual topics by selecting (Expand/condense topic) on the topic.
Collapse entire topic trees under a parent topic by selecting (Expand/collapse topic tree) underneath the parent topic.
Use the zoom controls to zoom out (), zoom in (), or center the root topic () on the canvas. You can also click and drag on the canvas to manually reposition the entire dashboard.

Note
Some dashboard interactions are limited when zoomed out. Zoom in to the maximum size to edit all aspects of the dashboard.

In addition to cleaning up the canvas view, be sure to delete unused stories from the Stories panel by selecting the story and choosing

(Delete).

Tip

Open the Table of Contents () from the View section of the toolbar to see a list of all topics, stories, and story pages used in the dashboard.

View Your Dashboard

At any time when building your dashboard, save and then choose (Start Presentation) from the View section of the toolbar to launch the Digital Boardroom presentation.

For details on presenting your dashboard, see Running Your Digital Boardroom Presentation.

You can also customize the look of your Digital Boardroom presentation by setting display options and creating a custom theme. For details, see Presentation Settings and Theming.