Charts and Dashboards Part 2

Introduction – 00:00

Why, hello good people and welcome to part two of our look at Charts and Dashboards in the Freezerworks Web Client, the online version of our unique sample management software. Last time, we went through the process of creating a chart. So hopefully, you've had some time to create a few more charts that we can now combine into a dashboard, such as this one. Now, I've got plenty, so I'm just going to get started. If you need assistance creating charts be sure to check out part 1 of this series or our Help Guide for detailed instructions.

Configure Dashboards – 0:46

So, to create a new dashboard, we need to start on the Home page. We hover over Dashboards and click Configure Dashboards. Any existing dashboards that your group is assigned will be listed here. Clicking them will open their configuration for editing purposes, but we'll leave those alone for now. Instead, click Create New Dashboard, and here is the Edit Dashboard page. The left side is where the charts will eventually be placed and organized, while the right box acts as sort of a palette for the configuration.

You can start by entering a name for the dashboard, let's go with Seth Dash. Next, as you can see I have a list of charts available to me that I can click and drag on to the configuration side. Presto, my chart appears as well as two other spots where I can put more charts. If I drag this chart to this first box, another spot will appear. If I drag a third chart, a fourth spot will appear, and then four charts is actually the limit for every line on the dashboard, but you can have an infinite number of lines to balance it out. For me, I don't like things so cluttered so I'm going to remove a couple of these charts by clicking the X's in the corners. Then, I'm going to drag a chart to the second line. In fact, line charts, such as this one, will typically fit better on their own line. Now, I'm going to build a four-line dashboard. You can observe if you'd like or skip ahead to the next step.

Now that I have my four line dashboard, we can check to make sure it looks exactly the way we want it to, by clicking Preview. There's our dashboard, if we like what we see we can go ahead and click Close Preview. Then, before we save the dashboard configuration, we need to assign it to the appropriate groups so other users can use it too. Currently, I only have one group listed, but the process remains the same. Select the desired group of Groups you'd like to assign to this dashboard. Click Save to save the dashboard configuration.

Viewing the Dashboard – 03:30

This is our dashboard in action. The dropdown at the top will allow us to select a different dashboard configuration, while the Edit button allows us to make on-the-spot changes to the dashboard. As for the charts themselves, they each have two clickable buttons. The Refresh button will do exactly that, it will refresh the chart (rerun the query so the data is up-to-date). The Search button allows you to quickly pull up a list of the records the chart is displaying graphically. Let's click it, and there's our list of aliquots that we can now perform actions upon. Now, let's return to the dashboard and talk about Legend Filters. If you'd like to quickly filter some data on a chart, click the colored lines in the legend to turn off a data point. Let's say I just don't want to see the available aliquots. I'd click the blue line next to Available. Don't worry about this saving; this is just a quick way to clean up your chart for ease of use. The charts will return to normal next time you load them.

User Preferences – 04:41

Finally, let's open User Preferences and talk about a few new fields. Click your username in the top right corner, then Edit User Preferences. First, the Default Landing Page allows you to choose either the Home page or the new Dashboard as the page that opens whenever you log in. It depends on your workflow of course, but some of you will definitely want to see your charts before beginning any actual work. I'll select Dashboard, and then next, I'll choose which of my available dashboards will be pre-selected when the Dashboard page opens. As you can see, my three available dashboards are listed and I'll select the one I made today. Lastly, the Select Group Profile for Charts field will determine what data you see on charts. Group-based securities will take effect for chart results, therefore, if you are a member of multiple groups be sure to select the group that grants you the widest access so you can have the most accurate charts possible.

Conclusion – 05:45

That about does it for today's look at Charts and Dashboards. For more help using the completely customizable LIMS solution we call Freezerworks, check out our video library or contact one of our support specialists. Thanks as always for watching, see you next time.