Once a dashboard exists, most of your time goes on two things: the time range everyone reads it through, and the arrangement of cards that makes it readable at a glance.
The time range
The time controls sit in the action bar at the top of the dashboard, alongside Share and Add Card. Whatever you choose applies to every time-based card at once, and is saved with the dashboard — so it is the range the next person sees too.
| Preset | Window |
|---|---|
| Past 15 minutes | Rolling, ending now |
| Past 1 hour | Rolling, ending now |
| Past 24 hours | Rolling, ending now |
| Past 7 days | Rolling, ending now |
| Past 30 days | Rolling, ending now |
| Past 90 days | Rolling, ending now |
| Past 365 days | Rolling, ending now |
| Year to date | 1 January to now |
| Custom range | A fixed start and end you pick |
Custom opens a calendar with start and end times. You enter them in your own local time.
Live updates sits at the bottom of the same menu. With it on the window keeps moving with the clock and cards refresh as data arrives; with it off the range is pinned to when you applied it. Live is the right choice for a dashboard someone leaves open on a wall; off is the right choice when several people need to be looking at exactly the same window.
Note: Not every card follows the dashboard range. Time-series cards do. Text and image cards have nothing temporal to follow, so they stay as they are.
Arranging cards
Hovering a card reveals controls in its top-right corner for moving, editing and deleting it. Two habits make a real difference:
Give cards that should be compared the same width. Two charts of different lengths side by side are genuinely harder to read against each other, even when the data lines up. If two measurements are related, match their sizes or stack them at full width.
Put the thing people check first at the top. The time control is at the top of the page, so a reader who has to scroll down and back up to change the range will stop changing it.
Keeping dashboards readable
On a large project, resist adding to a dashboard that is already full. Separate dashboards for different structures, instrument groups, or audiences stay readable in a way that one long dashboard does not.
A dashboard nobody scrolls to the bottom of is not showing the data at the bottom.
If you cannot edit
If you can open a dashboard but the editing controls are unavailable, you hold viewer access on that dashboard. That is true regardless of your role on the project, because dashboard access is granted separately.
Editors can delete dashboards they created themselves, but not ones created by someone else. Roles and permissions covers this.
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