Widget types
The dashboard builder supports the following widget types:- Charts — Visualize reports from your workbook
- Text — Add titles, descriptions, and rich formatting in Markdown
- Controls — Let viewers filter the data, switch the time granularity, swap which field the charts are built on, or drive several controls at once
- AI summary — Generate narrative summaries of dashboard data on demand
- Spacer, Divider, Stack, Grid & Tabs — Non-data layout elements for whitespace, section breaks, and grouping widgets
Adding widgets
Add widgets from the toolbar at the top of the dashboard builder, in the order the buttons sit there: pick reports from the Charts picker to add charts, then Add Controls for Filter, Time Granularity, Field Switcher and Parent controls, Add Containers for Tabs, Horizontal stack, Vertical stack and Grid, and Add Other Widgets for Text, Analysis (the AI summary widget), Spacer and Divider. Each item — a toolbar button, or an option inside the Add Controls, Add Containers or Add Other Widgets menus — can be added in two ways:- Click it to drop the widget into the first open spot on the canvas.
- Drag it from the toolbar onto the canvas to place it exactly where you want. As you drag, a full-size placeholder previews the widget’s footprint and the surrounding widgets reflow to open a slot; release to drop it there. Dragging is especially handy on dense dashboards, where clicking would otherwise place the new widget far down the page.
Adding a widget at a spot on the canvas
You can also start from the canvas itself. Hover an empty part of the board — a gap between widgets, the space below the last one, or the canvas of an empty dashboard — and the cell under the pointer is highlighted with a plus:- Click the cell to open the insert menu there.
- Drag across empty cells to select a rectangle of them. The highlight grows to cover the whole region, and the insert menu opens when you release. Press Esc before you release to cancel.
- After a click, the widget is added at its usual size with its top-left corner on the clicked cell, shifted left or up only as far as it takes to fit. Where its usual size doesn’t fit, it’s added at its minimum size instead.
- After a drag, the widget fills the selected region exactly. A control is the exception: it takes the region’s width at its own fixed height.
- A divider always spans the full width of the board, or of the grid it goes into, at a height of one row. A click offers it only on a row with no widget in it, and a drag only when the region spans that full width; it then takes the region’s top row.
Widget size
Widgets are sized in the dashboard’s grid cells. Each type is added at its own size on a 12-column dashboard, and has a minimum it can’t be dragged below. The one exception to the added size is adding a widget at a spot on the canvas, which falls back to the minimum where that’s all the room there is, and fills a region you drag out:
A KPI chart is added smaller, at 3×3, and carries the same minimum as any other chart. A control resizes by width only — its height is fixed by the input it renders — and never narrows below 2 columns. The layout widgets carry their own sizes, listed on their page.
A minimum only constrains a resize you make in the builder. A dashboard that already stores a widget smaller than its minimum keeps that size — in the builder and on the published dashboard alike — until you resize that widget yourself. The board’s edge outranks a minimum too, so a widget with less room than its minimum between it and the right edge is held to the room it has rather than pushed off the board.
Arranging widgets
Drag any widget to move it, and use the handle in its bottom-right corner to resize it — the surrounding widgets shift to make room. To work with several widgets at once, select them first:- Click a widget to select it.
- Shift-click to add widgets to, or remove them from, the selection.
- Drag a marquee — press on any empty part of the canvas and drag a rectangle over the widgets you want; every widget it touches is selected. Until the rectangle reaches a widget, the drag selects empty cells to add a widget there instead; it turns into a marquee as soon as it reaches one.
- Move the group — drag any selected widget and the whole selection moves together, keeping its relative arrangement.
- Delete the group — press Delete or Backspace to remove every selected widget at once. If the selection holds a container that still has widgets in it, Cube asks you to confirm first.