Dashboards Overview

Dashboards are a way of grouping different reports together on one screen and displaying the results as tables, charts or other combinations to give a quick overview of various data to aid decision-making.
Typically dashboards are created by function:
- For example, the Academic team may want to quickly see an overview of Classing and Attendance data, where the Accommodation team may want to quickly see an overview of Placements and future Bookings.
They are composed of widgets based on a flexible grid system.
Users can click through to the background report in each widget to explore the data in more depth if required.
The Dashboards system is Salesforce functionality and has a number of powerful features.
- Note: the upgrade to Salesforce Lightning from Salesforce Classic introduces a vastly improved reporting and dashboard system.
To use the Dashboard system effectively, a good understanding of the reporting system together with database objects, relationships and fields is required.
A number of stock pre-configured dashboards are supplied as part of the Schoolworks package, but it is possible to customise these and/or add additional dashboards as required.
Dashboard Folders can be controlled with permissions to restrict Management, Editing and Viewing of the dashboards within.

Select the “Dashboards” tab from the navigation bar to open the Dashboards system.
The system will always load with a view of the user’s Recently Viewed dashboards.
Dashboards are organised within Dashboard folders.
To find a specific dashboard, navigate to All Dashboards and use the search function, or navigate to All Folders to browse the contents of each folder.

If you cannot find a dashboard you know exists, check with the dashboard owner to see if it contained within a folder you do not have permissions to access.

Click on the Dashboard Name to open the report.
This will load the dashboard as configured.
The first thing to check is the last time the dashboard was refreshed.
- Refreshing the dashboard will re-run all associated reports to pull the latest data from the system and present on the dashboard.

Some dashboards may have one or more filters at the top of the screen that can be applied to the dashboard to display more specific data:

Typically, a school will create a set of agreed dashboards for all to use, then lock them down so they cannot be changed.
Please see this article for more information on creating dashboards.

Schoolworks Knowledgebase