Text, selectors and input components

Text

+ View → Text shows one value from a column (usually the latest) in large type, with a Default Styles preset. The KPI card on a dashboard — "Booked this month 47,510" — is this.

A dashboard also has a non-data text element (dashboard editor → the basic views → Text Element): free text, with content, Text Styling, background colour and horizontal and vertical alignment. Tick Editable in Preview Mode and a viewer can change the words temporarily. The heading strip across the top of the sample dashboard is a non-data text element.

Selectors: Dropdown, Radio, Checkbox

Three entries under + View → Selector. Bound to a table, the options are the distinct values of a column (every region, say); Max Option Values caps how many are shown.

On their own they do very little. Their value is on a dashboard: what the selector holds becomes a dashboard parameter, other components filter on that parameter, and so "pick a region and every chart follows". The recipe is in Dashboards · Interaction and actions.

A dashboard also has versions not bound to a table, whose options you type in by hand.

Text Input and Date Picker

Dashboard-only, among the non-data views:

• Text Input — a box, optionally constrained by Input Format (unrestricted, phone number, email), with a Default Text. Its value becomes a dashboard parameter, or feeds an action that writes into a table.
• Date Picker — a date control; the format can be year-month-day, year-month, hour:minute:second or the full stamp, and it can have a default. The classic use: pick a month, and every chart on the dashboard filters to it.

Embed

Embed puts a web page (an iframe) on a dashboard — a page from another system, a map, a document. Embed Type selects what you are embedding.

In one line

Text is for saying, selectors and inputs are for asking, charts are for answering. An interactive dashboard usually has all three.