VIDEO: How to – Dashboards pt. 1 | monday.com

Have you ever been drivin’ down the road in your pick up truck and you’ve got everything you need right at your fingertips on your dashboard? Steering wheel, blinkers, windshield wipers, radio, allll right there in one spot? Well, That’s what it feels like to use a monday.com Dashboard. Oh, and hey! I’m Kyle! Hope you’ve been good and great, great and good. Today, I’ll be showing you how to make AND use your monday.com dashboards. If you’re looking for a more basic intro or a deeper dive into other topics with monday.com, like boards, check out the other vids I’ve made in our monday.com playlist, you can click the annotation in the top right corner to check those out.

Otherwise, let’s get started! Here we have the screen that pops up whenever you create a new dashboard. If you’ve forgotten, you can create a dashboard from your workspace over here. The options you see in the top right corner are going to be pretty similar to what you’ve seen on other pages. Your share button will bring up who currently has access and what access levels they have, and you also have the option to invite others here, or via e-mail if they’re outside of your organization.

The question mark to the left is for general help, and one thing to note here, you’ll see the ‘Knowledge Base’ button here. If you go to that, you’ll be brought to monday.com’s Knowledge Base where there are TONS of articles on all sorts of different subjects, from basic functions to troubleshooting and more, so that’s definitely a useful font of knowledge to keep handy. If you click on the ellipses, or the lil’ three dots, you’ll see a handful more options.

Present mode fills out the screen and takes away the panel and buttons on the left hand side of the screen. This is useful if you’re sharing this particular dashboard screen on a tv, another monitor, or as the name would suggest, in a presentation. The Live data toggle allows you to have the dashboard show live, editable data, or if you want it to be read-only. Now, you might think, why would I want read-only data? Well, if you’re worried that you’d mess with something while in your presentation and thus add inaccurate data, it’d be good to lock things down.

Also, if you’re presenting a dashboard that pulls in a LOT of data from numerous different boards, the load time will be shaved down quite a bit by switching to the read-only Live Data Off option. Ultimately, it just depends on what is more important for you as each situation arises. As an alternative, you can also change the editability of your dashboard using the ‘View’ and “Edit’ buttons at the top of your dashboard here. Since we don’t have anything to view yet, view isn’t an option, but once we add in some widgets we can choose if we want to have edit access or view access only.

Now back over to the settings- down at the bottom, you’ll see the buttons to rename, duplicate, export, or delete your dashboard. Before moving forward, I want to remind you that there IS a difference between a dashboard that exists in your workspace versus one that exists within a specific board. We touched on this in our monday.com boards video, but basically, a dashboard within a board can ONLY report on information within that board. A dashboard within the workspace can report on information from a variety of different boards.

To further illustrate that, in this example we’ll be pulling in data from two separate boards, to help drive that point across. With all that said, let’s start making some widgets! A widget is basically a visual representation of some of your data within your boards. There are a handful to choose from, but one of the ones my team uses the most are charts, and it’s a pretty solid one to start with. So before we even mess with the meat and potatoes of this thing, you’ll see that you can adjust the size by clicking on the corners of the chart and dragging it around until it looks the way you want.

You can also change the title of it by simply clicking on the title and then changing it to whatever makes sense for the situation at hand. So to play with our settings, we’ll click on the ellipses in the top right corner of the chart and hit settings. There’s a whole bunch of different chart types you can choose from, but for simplicity’s sake we’ll stick with a bar graph for this demonstration. If you’re dealing with percentages though, maybe try a pie chart, or if you’re dealing with changes over time, I’d recommend a line chart.

Another thing you’ll want to set is what boards you want this widget to pull from and you can narrow it down even further by what groups you want to pull from within those boards. Now we need to determine what our axes are going to be. Isn’t it funny that axes and axes are spelled the same but sound so different and mean wildly different things? English is weird. Ok so anyways, a chart like this is based on two axes, an X axis and a Y axis. X goes left and right, Y goes up and down.

So if we go to the x-axis section, we see there are a bunch of column types available. Let’s say I’m looking to show how many items we have within each status. For the way this chart is organized, the X-axis is where all the different bars on the bar graph will sit, and the Y-axis is how tall each of them will be. Since I want to see the quantity in each status, I’ll want to put this column type as ‘status’ and make sure that the status columns from each board are what we’re using.

On the Y-axis, we’re looking to see the quantity, so we’ll want to use ‘count items’ and that’ll show just how many there are. This ISN’T pulling in the sum of anything, if we wanted that we’d want to use the ‘number’ option. But since I just want a count, we’ll go with count items. We can also choose if we want to show the sum, the average, the median, the min, or the max. For this example, sum works. From here, we can see that we’ve got our chart set up with what I had in mind.

Each bar represents a status, and the size of the bar is dictated by how many items are within that status. A few extra things you can mess with here, you can add benchmark lines which can be useful if you want to show a goal amount that you want to hit or something along those lines. So for example, if our goal was 10 items, if I put that in here you’ll see a dotted line appear right at the 10 spot. You can also name this benchmark line and choose which color you want.

You can sort your chart by the X or Y axis ascending or descending, and there are a few other options here that I rarely ever use, but the ‘show empty values’ can be useful if say, you want to show the quantity of ALL of your statuses, even if one of them has zero items in it. Now, let’s say I like what I’m seeing here, but now I want to see which of these totals are coming from Board 1 vs. Board 2. This might be useful if you have different boards from different teams.

I can accomplish this by switching my chart type to stacked bar which will bring up this new section here called Stack By. In the stack by section, if I choose ‘board’ you’ll see it parses out within each bar, how many items came from each board. Pretty neat! Ok, that was a lot of info. Let’s pick up here in the next video. Thanks so much for watching! If you want more info on project management solutions OTHER than monday.com, visit TechnologyAdvice.com for our list of the top options available today.

And if you want to check out the rest of the videos I’ve made for monday.com, check out this playlist where you can watch all of them as they are released. Thanks again for watching, and go be good and great, great and good.