Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards- P4

Chia sẻ: Cong Thanh | Ngày: | Loại File: PDF | Số trang:20

Thêm vào BST

Báo xấu

78
lượt xem 8
download

Download Vui lòng tải xuống để xem tài liệu đầy đủ

Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards- P4: There are many people I would like to thank as I sit here after having just penned the final chapter of this book. I am sure I will miss many specific people if I tried to list them all, but I am compelled to mention some specific supporters.

Chủ đề:

Bình luận(0) Đăng nhập để gửi bình luận!

Lưu

Nội dung Text: Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards- P4

Chapter 3 The Manage Dashboard Screen 37
38 Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards T here are a few prerequisites to creating a dashboard in Oracle CRM On Demand. You will have, by this point, determined that a dashboard is the correct solution to fill your reporting need. You will have a plan for what you want to include on that dashboard and will know who will be using it and how. Of course, you should also have the reports you developed and saved in Oracle CRM On Demand that you intend to place on your dashboard. This book will not do much to help you with this last prerequisite. If you need a resource for developing reports in Oracle CRM On Demand, please stop here and pick up a copy of Oracle CRM On Demand Reporting (McGraw-Hill, 2008). In this chapter, you will read about the Dashboard tab in Oracle CRM On Demand, particularly the Manage Dashboards page. If you access the Dashboard tab in Oracle CRM On Demand and do not see the Manage Dashboard link at the right end of the header just below the Help link, you are most likely missing the Manage Dashboard privilege in your Role setup. Your system administrator can assist you with this if you do not have access to update your role settings. The Dashboard Tab The Dashboard interface is simple. To access dashboards in Oracle CRM On Demand, you open the Dashboard screen by clicking the Dashboard tab. Upon accessing the Dashboard tab, the Overview Dashboard loads automatically. This is because the Overview Dashboard is the first dashboard listed and the default dashboard in the Select Dashboard field. Besides the dashboard itself, there are only two elements on this screen. The Select Dashboard field and Show button are used to select and execute a dashboard. If no custom dashboards have been created in your Oracle CRM On Demand environment yet, you will probably see only the six prebuilt dashboards listed here. If you happen to be using a version of Oracle CRM On Demand with Contact On Demand integrated or a Partner Management version of Oracle CRM On Demand, you could also see the Communications or Channel Manager Snapshot dashboards here. As new dashboards are added to your instance, they will appear in this list, in alphabetical order, below the six prebuilt dashboards. Your custom dashboards are separated from the prebuilt dashboards in the list by a dashed line. When you select a dashboard from the Select Dashboard field, the selected dashboard does not run right away. If it did, it would get rather annoying, rather quickly. To run a dashboard, select the dashboard from the Select Dashboard field and click the Show button. The Dashboard screen will refresh and begin loading the dashboard. When a dashboard loads, all of the reports on the dashboard execute at once, which sometimes means that the reports render on the screen at different times rather than all together.
Chapter 3: The Manage Dashboard Screen 39 Dashboards load inside a frame on the Dashboard screen below the light blue bar just below the Select Dashboard field. This frame will contain scrollbars, both vertical and horizontal, if the size of the dashboard is larger than the size of the frame. The other element on the Dashboard screen is a hyperlink to the Manage Dashboards screen. The Manage Dashboards link, located on the right side of the Dashboard header, is only visible if you have the Manage Dashboards privilege enabled on your user role. If you do not see this link on the Dashboard screen, contact your system administrator to have your user role modified. You will need to sign out and sign back in to see the change. Manage Dashboards When you click the Manage Dashboards hyperlink on the Dashboard tab, you navigate to the Manage Dashboards screen, as shown in Figure 3-1. It is on this screen that you will create new custom dashboards. Creating a new dashboard is a two-step process. The act of creating the dashboard record is just the first step. The design step is the second step, and is much more involved. The elements on the Manage Dashboards screen include the New Dashboard button, which, as the name implies, is used to create the dashboard record. Once a custom dashboard exists in Oracle CRM On Demand, the other links on this screen become active. FiguRe 3-1. Manage Dashboards screen
40 Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards Below the Manage Dashboards header, you will see the dashboard name and description of all of the custom dashboards. To the left of each dashboard name, you will find an Edit link along with a drop-down menu containing the Delete and Design links. By clicking the Dashboard Name header, you can change the sort order of the dashboard list. You may notice that the six prebuilt dashboards are not shown in the list of dashboards on the Manage Dashboards screen. This begs the question of how you change or delete the prebuilt dashboards. The simple answer to that question is that you cannot. As of this writing, the six dashboards included with every instance of Oracle CRM On Demand are neither editable nor removable. They always appear in the Select Dashboard field on the Dashboard tab. This, of course, is subject to change in future releases of Oracle CRM On Demand as the features and functionality continue to expand and be enhanced with each release. New Dashboard/edit Dashboard Before you can begin laying out your new dashboard with reports and links and prompts, you must create a new dashboard record. I like to think of this step as creating the canvas for the dashboard I am about to create. That is essentially what you are doing when you click the New Dashboard button and create that dashboard record. You are creating the unique URL, or webpage, that will be your dashboard. To create the dashboard, click the New Dashboard button. This brings you to the Dashboard Edit screen shown in Figure 3-2. There is not much to this screen, as you can see. There are only two fields, and of the two, only the Dashboard Name field is required. To create your dashboard, enter a name for the dashboard in the Dashboard Name field. Bear in mind that the name you give the dashboard here will appear in the Select Dashboard field on the Dashboard tab, so it pays to be both concise and as descriptive as possible with the dashboard name. If you find that you just cannot describe your dashboard with a simple dashboard name, you can take advantage of the Description field. The Description field, it is good to know, is really only helpful for you and other dashboard FiguRe 3-2. Dashboard Edit screen
Chapter 3: The Manage Dashboard Screen 41 developers. The description that you enter here only shows up on the Manage Dashboards screen, to which most of the users of your Oracle CRM On Demand application probably have no access. All most users will ever see before actually executing the dashboard is the dashboard name in the Select Dashboard field on the Dashboard tab. Once you have named, and optionally described, your dashboard on the Dashboard Edit screen, click the Save button to save the dashboard record and return to the Manage Dashboards screen. If you are creating multiple dashboards, you also have the option of clicking the Save & New Dashboard button. This button saves the current dashboard and brings you right back to the Dashboard Edit screen, ready to create another dashboard record. The Cancel button allows you to exit the Dashboard Edit screen without saving or creating the dashboard record. Back on the Manage Dashboards screen, after creating a new dashboard record, you will see the newly created dashboard in the list of custom dashboards. To the left of the dashboard name are the Edit link and the drop-down menu with the Delete and Design options. The Edit link will bring you right back to the Dashboard Edit screen, where you can change the name and description of the dashboard. Delete Dashboard Inside the drop-down menu to the left of each dashboard listed on the Manage Dashboards screen you will find a Delete link. The Delete link, as you might expect, allows you to delete a dashboard record. Deleted dashboards do not appear in the Deleted Items list like other records in Oracle CRM On Demand. This means that once deleted, that dashboard is gone forever and cannot be recovered. When you click the Delete link, you are presented with a confirmation dialog box, so it does take two clicks to delete a dashboard. Design Dashboard The final element of the Manage Dashboards screen is the Design link that appears in the drop-down menu to the immediate left of each dashboard name. The Design link opens the window shown in Figure 3-3. This is the Dashboard Editor window, which is the focus of the remainder of this book. For now, I will offer a brief description of the elements of the Dashboard Editor window. You will find exhaustive detail about each of these elements in the chapters that follow. Dashboard Properties and Page Controls Beginning with the buttons to the right of the dashboard name in the header, the first is the Dashboard Properties button. There are not many properties to edit here. Essentially, the dashboard properties that you are able to modify here include the
42 Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards FiguRe 3-3. Dashboard Editor window dashboard description and the name and description of any additional dashboard pages. This brings us to the Page Selector and Add Dashboard Page buttons to the right of the dashboard properties button. The Page Selector button allows you to select the page within the dashboard that you want to modify. Clearly, this indicates that it is possible to have multiple pages in your dashboard, which is what the Add Dashboard Page button allows you to do. In the next chapter, you can read much more about pages in a dashboard and their properties. Next up is the PDF and Print Control properties button. With the PDF and Print Control settings, you are able to identify print settings such as page size, orientation, and headers and footers. It is not unusual for users to want to print dashboards, and with these settings you can control how that printout will appear and what information will print on the page. The Add Column button gives you the ability to split the dashboard page into multiple columns. Each column will have its own Properties button and Delete button, allowing you to format each column independently and remove columns from the layout. Dashboard Objects Under the Dashboard Objects heading on the Dashboard Editor screen, we find five objects that may be dragged onto the dashboard canvas. Each of these is covered in great detail in Chapter 5 of this book. Here I provide a brief description of each.
Chapter 3: The Manage Dashboard Screen 43 First is the Section object. Multiple sections may be added to your dashboard and configured independently. A section is essentially a frame within the dashboard. All of the other objects that you place on your dashboard will be positioned inside a section. A number of options may be set for each section. Sections may be collapsible, they may be displayed dynamically based on the results of a query request, they may have their own title displayed and be formatted with borders, and so forth. The next object is the Link or Image object. This is a simple object that allows you to display a hyperlink or image in your dashboard. This can be a link to another report in Oracle CRM On Demand or any webpage URL. The Text object allows you to add some static text to your dashboard. This may be descriptive text, like we see in the prebuilt dashboards. You could include anything here, from instructions on how to use the dashboard, to important phone numbers, to a copyright statement. The Folder object is an interesting one. This object allows you to embed a report folder in your dashboard. The folder can be any folder in the reports’ Shared Folders. This essentially places a folder of report hyperlinks right on the dashboard screen. The Guided Navigation Link object, shown in the list as “Guided Nav. Link,” allows you to place a hyperlink on the dashboard, but display that link only when certain conditions are met. Those conditions are determined by whether or not rows are returned in another query request saved as a report in Oracle CRM On Demand. Saved Content The final section on the Dashboard Editor screen is Saved Content. This is where you will find all of the shared reports in Oracle CRM On Demand that you can add to your dashboard. Detailed information on adding reports to your dashboard is in Chapter 6. Essentially, the process of adding reports to a dashboard is a matter of locating the report in the folders in the Saved Content section, and clicking and dragging the report to the dashboard canvas. You may then adjust the properties and layout settings for each report independently to specify exactly how each report will appear in the dashboard.
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 4 Dashboard Pages and Properties 45
46 Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards I said earlier that a dashboard is a webpage that contains frames into which you place reports and other dashboard objects. When you created the dashboard record, as described in the previous chapter, you created that webpage. At this point, your dashboard is empty. In this chapter, I describe the process of configuring the dashboard by setting the dashboard properties and configuring dashboard pages. I should point out that the order of the remainder of this book is designed for your reference and ease of finding information rather than implying an order to how you complete your dashboard. Once you have created the dashboard record, which is an obvious first step, the order in which you configure the elements on that dashboard is not terribly important. Configuring Dashboard Pages Across the top of the Dashboard Editor screen are a number of buttons that are used to configure the dashboard page. Figure 4-1 shows these elements. The first button is the Dashboard Properties button. You can identify this button by the pointing finger icon; or, by hovering your mouse over the button, you will see the name of the button in a tooltip. I am going to skip this button for now and move to the next element. Multipage Dashboards Next up on the Dashboard Editor toolbar is the Page Selector. This field allows you to select the page that you are designing on the Dashboard Editor screen. When you initially create a new dashboard, that dashboard will contain only a single page named “Page 1,” and this is what you see in the Page drop-down list field. Your dashboard may contain many pages. The number of pages that can be included in your dashboard is technically unlimited. Your dashboard may, however, become unwieldy, reaching a practical limit, if you add too many pages. FiguRe 4-1. Dashboard Editor toolbar
Chapter 4: Dashboard Pages and Properties 47 FiguRe 4-2. Dashboard page tabs Dashboard pages are presented as tabs within the dashboard, as shown in Figure 4-2. Clicking a tab in the dashboard opens the page and executes all of the reports that have been added to that page. To add a new dashboard page, click the Add Dashboard Page button. This button looks like a sheet of paper with a plus sign on it. When you click the Add Dashboard Page button, the Add Dashboard Page window, shown in Figure 4-3, opens. This is a simple window that contains just two fields. Name your new dashboard page by completing the Page Name field. The name that you give your dashboard page will appear on the respective page tab. The description you enter in the Page Description field appears as a tooltip when your user places their mouse pointer over the dashboard page tab. So why would you want to have multiple pages in your dashboard? Well, there are a few reasons, and they all have something to do with the way users use the dashboard and interact with it. It would often be just as easy to provide three separate dashboards as it would be to provide a single dashboard with three pages. So the first reason is to provide multiple dashboards in as few clicks as possible. I cannot count the number of times I have been asked to find a way to present a report/dashboard to FiguRe 4-3. Add Dashboard Page window
48 Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards the user in fewer clicks. As technology continues to progress, a trend that I predict will continue is the reduction of clicks. By putting multiple pages in your dashboard, the user can access the dashboard and then be a single click away from the next dashboard page. When we get to the topic of dashboard filter prompts, you will see that a single prompt can affect one or all pages in the dashboard, further reducing the number of clicks necessary to get to the dashboard data. Another reason is for printing. Reports, as you know, are designed for presentation on the computer screen more so than the printed page. Dashboards are often designed to provide a high-level summary of sales and service data that is printed and provided to executives, included in presentations, and even posted on bulletin boards in the company break room. Dashboards can be designed for the printed page for this purpose, but may require multiple pages to include the necessary data. Similarly, the dashboard may contain reports from multiple subject areas and display reports for multiple unrelated topics. That is the power of the dashboard. It brings multiple reports from multiple subjects together in a single place. Sometimes, this togetherness is desired for practicality, but as humans, we still have a need to segment and organize, so we include multiple pages to separate our sales reports from our service reports, for example. Whether it is a matter of usability, practicality, or personal preference, the multipage dashboard is a popular and useful tool in Oracle CRM On Demand. PDF and Print Controls The next button on the Dashboard Editor toolbar looks like a printer with a pointing finger on top of it. This is the PDF and Print Control Properties button, and clicking it opens the PDF and Print Control window shown in Figure 4-4. You will use this window to adjust the way your dashboard pages print. FiguRe 4-4. PDF and Print Control window
Chapter 4: Dashboard Pages and Properties 49 When you print a dashboard, you have two options. You can open the dashboard to a new HTML screen and send that screen to your printer by clicking the Printer Friendly link at the bottom of your dashboard, and then use your browser print controls to print the screen. The other option is a PDF file. Click the Printer Friendly link at the bottom of your dashboard and select PDF. This opens the dashboard into a PDF file that you can then send to your printer. Nearly all of the settings available here on the PDF and Print Control window affect the PDF print option and do nothing for the HTML print option. This has to do with the nature of the two formats. An HTML file is not affected by the paradigm of the printed page. A single HTML page can go on and on without a break in it. The scroll bars at the bottom and right of the HTML screen are there because your computer screen is not large enough to contain the entire HTML page, not because of any particular paper size or page breaks. That being said, a couple of settings here can affect the HTML presentation of the dashboard, and I will point those out as we go. Page Settings In the Page Settings section of the PDF and Print Control window, you have three fields. The first two pertain to the size and orientation of the printout that you desire for the printed version of your dashboard. These settings do not affect the way the dashboard is displayed on the screen in any way. The Paper Size field defaults to User Default, which will be the default setting in your installed PDF viewer. The options available in this field are US Letter (8.5" × 11"), A4 (210 mm × 297 mm), A3 (297 mm × 420 mm), A5 (148 mm × 210 mm), Folio (8.5" × 13"), and Legal (8.5" × 14"). The Orientation field allows you to select a print orientation of Portrait or Landscape. Again, this does not affect the appearance of the dashboard on the screen, but rather changes the orientation of the dashboard elements on the printed page. The third setting here in the Page Settings section is the Print Rows option. You can choose to print visible rows or all rows in the embedded reports. This setting applies to reports with Table views that default to the first set of records and have paging controls. For instance, a list of accounts may default to show only the first 25 records in the table. You have the option within the report to page through the records 25 rows at a time or show all rows by clicking the Show All Pages button on the table paging controls. If you open the report in an HTML-printer-friendly view, you will see just the visible rows on the screen. This holds true regardless of the setting in the Print Rows field. However, if you set the Print Rows field to All and open the dashboard in PDF Printer Friendly view, you will see all of the rows in the table, not just the first 25. If you leave this setting at Visible, then the HTML and PDF Printer Friendly views behave exactly the same. You will only see the visible rows in the printer-friendly view.
50 Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards If you want to print all rows, you would need to first display all of the rows in the table before clicking the Printer Friendly link at the bottom of the dashboard. Header and Footer The other section on the PDF and Print Control window is the Header And Footer section. You have the option of including a header, footer, or both on your printed dashboard. Including either a header or footer consists of two steps. First, click the Include Header or Include Footer check box. Next to each check box field is an Edit button. Click the Edit button to configure the header or footer on the Edit Header or Edit Footer window shown in Figure 4-5. On this window, we have five text fields to work with in formatting our page header or footer. You have at your disposal three rows of text for your header or footer. The first and third rows are single columns, and the middle row is three columns. This provides you with the flexibility of having three rows of text, with the center row laid out in columns as the fields appear, but it also allows for two single-column rows by using only the first and third rows. The center row is ignored if there is nothing entered into those fields. You can also have two rows in your header or footer, where either the top row or the bottom row has three columns. Each of these five fields is a text field. You can enter text in these fields that you want to appear in the header and footer of your printed dashboard. As you enter text in these fields, you can use the formatting buttons to make your text bold, italic, or underlined. Clicking these buttons adds tags to the text field. If you have text selected when you click a button, the start tag will be positioned before the selected FiguRe 4-5. Edit Header window
Chapter 4: Dashboard Pages and Properties 51 text and the end tag will be positioned after the selected text. You can also add these tags by typing them in directly. This sentence includes the tags for [b]bold[/b], [i]italics[/i], and [u]underline[/u] around their corresponding text effects. When you are looking at the Edit Header window, the text you enter into the text field will not appear formatted, so these tags will also help you imagine how the text will appear in the header and footer. The Line Break button inserts a line break at the current cursor position. The line break symbol [br/] appears in the text field indicating the position of the line break. The Insert field button gives you the ability to insert dynamic elements into your header and footer, such as dates, times, and page numbers. The options available to you from the Insert Field menu are Saved Name, Author Name, Date, Time, Page Number, and Image. When you click one of these options, a bit of code is inserted into the text field at the current cursor position. Table 4-1 describes these codes. The Saved Name expression returns the name of the dashboard page. If you have not added any pages to your dashboard, you will want to go ahead and rename the dashboard page if you want something other than the default “Page 1” returned by the Saved Name expression in your header or footer. The Author Name expression actually returns the entire user sign-in ID for the current user. This may not be the most desirable result, as the user ID actually includes the company name prefix and the slash, which appears as a hash/pound sign (#) in the results in your header or footer. It may be desirable to include it in the footer, however, if you want to know who printed that dashboard left in the copier or on the printer in the office. The Date expression returns the date in month/day/year format. This format is not editable. In other words, you cannot change the code to @{timeCreated[yy/mm/dd]} to change the format to year/month/day. The Time expression returns the time at which the dashboard was opened in Oracle CRM On Demand. The data repository time is shown, which is not insert Field inserted Code Saved Name @{savedName} Author Name @{authorName} Date @{timeCreated[mm/dd/yy]} Time @{timeCreated[hh::mm::ss]} Page Number @{pageNumber} Image @{fmap: …} TaBle 4-1. Insert Fields for Dashboard Headers and Footers
52 Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards necessarily the user’s local time. It is a good idea to include some text after the @{timeCreated[hh::mm::ss]} expression to indicate the correct time zone so there is no confusion. The Page Number expression returns a single number indicating the page number of the printed dashboard. This does not correspond to the dashboard page number. In other words, if your dashboard has three pages, it appears with three tabs in Oracle CRM On Demand. If you add a header to the second page (tab) in your dashboard and insert the page number in the header or footer, the first page of the printed dashboard page will be page number one. The Image expression allows you to insert one of the stock images from the Oracle BI Presentation Server. Because Oracle CRM On Demand is a hosted service, you do not have the ability to add custom images to the presentation server and are limited to the images provided by default. Of course, these images are more useful for conditional formatting within your reports than they are for headers and footers. Eventually, Oracle may provide access to the Presentation Server for loading custom images, but that ability is currently not available in Oracle CRM On Demand. If you do want to select one of the stock images, you simply select Image from the Insert Field menu, and the Graphics window (see Figure 4-6) opens for you to make your selection. Click one of the images on the left to open the library of images within the selected family, and then select one of the images and click OK. The result is an expression such as @{fmap:meters/light/stop/1r.gif} in the header or footer text field. FiguRe 4-6. Graphics window
Chapter 4: Dashboard Pages and Properties 53 Returning to the Edit Header or Edit Footer window, you find that there is a Clear button to the right of the Insert Field button. This button will clear the entire header or footer. Clicking this button removes all text and expressions entered into the five text fields. Next to each of the text fields, you find an Edit Format button. When you click an Edit Format button, the Edit Format window opens, as shown in Figure 4-7. The Edit Format window allows you to make decisions on the way the fonts and header and footer sections appear on your dashboard. The font settings available here allow you to set the font family, size, color, style, and effects. The default font is 10 point Arial, and the default color is black with regular styling and no effects. Your font options are Arial, Arial Black, Arial Narrow, Courier New, Garamond, Lucida Sans Unicode, Microsoft Sans Serif, Times New Roman, Tahoma, and Verdana. If your company has a standard font, you may want to select a font for your dashboard header and footer that adheres to this standard. To change the font color, click on the white box to open the color selector. You can choose from 48 standard colors. Alternatively, if you know the six-digit hexadecimal color code for your desired color, you can enter # and the six-digit code in the field at the bottom of the color selector pop-up. You may also make your font bold, italic, or both using the Style field. The available effects are underlined and strikethrough. The difference between setting font styles here as opposed to the tags discussed earlier is that settings applied here apply to the entire text block rather than just the text inside the formatting tags. The format tags will take precedence over formatting applied on the Edit Format screen. FiguRe 4-7. Blank dashboard with multiple columns
54 Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards Within the cell portion of the Edit Format window, you are able to apply horizontal and vertical alignment and add a background color to the cell. The default horizontal alignment is centered for the top and bottom rows of the header or footer as well as the center column in the second row. The default is left-aligned in the first column of the second row, and right-aligned in the third column of the second row. To apply a background color, click the white box next to Background Color, and select the desired color. You can add single, double, or thick borders to one or more sides of your cell. You are able to select only one style of border for the text block. You apply the selected style to any side of the text block to which you add a border. To add a border, you can choose All from the Position field to apply a border to all four sides, or you can click on the sides of the cell in the diagram below the Position field. The color selector beside Border Color works exactly like the others on this window and allows you to change the color of all borders applied to this cell. Expand the Additional Formatting Options section, and you find fields that allow you to adjust the size of your text block and the padding around the value within the cell. The Height and Width fields allow you to adjust the size of the cell by entering a desired size in points or a percentage. In the second row of the header and footer, where you have three columns, you will find that the default width is set to 33%, 34%, and 33%, respectively. Padding provides space between the sides of the text box and the text displayed therein. If you happen to be knowledgeable on using cascading style sheets, you can apply your custom cascading style sheet using the respective fields. You can use a cascading style sheet to apply font formats to the cell. There are three small icons in the upper-right corner of the Edit Format window. The left icon, an eraser, resets all of the format settings to the default values. The copy icon copies all of the settings so you can format another text block; click the third icon, paste, to apply the same formats to the text block. Click OK to apply the format changes to the text block. You will not see any of the formatting back on the Edit Header or Edit Footer screen. Finally, back on the Edit Header or Edit Footer screen, we find one last field: the Display In Browser When Applicable check box. When you select this check box, the header will appear on the dashboard in the Oracle CRM On Demand interface. Footers only appear on a printed dashboard and not on the screen. Click OK on the Edit Header or Edit Footer screen to apply the changes and return to the Edit Dashboard screen. Dashboard Columns and Breaks The last button on the Edit Dashboard toolbar is the Add Column button. When you first create your new dashboard or dashboard page, you have exactly one column in your dashboard. You can add a column by clicking the Add Column button. The new column appears as a light gray block to the right of the existing column.
Chapter 4: Dashboard Pages and Properties 55 Each of these column blocks contains a Properties button and a Delete button. Figure 4-7 shows a blank dashboard page with multiple columns and breaks between columns. Each time you click the New Column button, an additional column area is added to the dashboard to the right of the last column in the dashboard. You can add as many columns as you like, but it quickly becomes impractical to have a dashboard that is more than two columns wide. Columns may be formatted by clicking the Properties button and selecting Column Properties. The resulting Column Properties window, shown in Figure 4-8, allows you to modify the alignment, background color, and border. You can also set the width of your columns on this screen. The other option under the Properties button on all columns other than the first column is the Break option. Click the Properties button and select Break, and you have three options. The Column Break option will insert a break between the selected column and the previous column, moving the selected column down to a new row. To move the column back up to the previous row, select the No Break option. The third option here is the Page Break With Column Break selection, which inserts a column break as well as a page break. Here again, we see another reference to page, which at this point, you should see has several meanings. FiguRe 4-8. Column Properties window
56 Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards The page break appears on the Dashboard Editor screen between rows as “------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Page Break with Column Break ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------” indicating where the page break will be when the dashboard is printed. If you have a page break in your dashboard and view that dashboard in Oracle CRM On Demand, you will not see an actual break in the page. Interestingly, however, if you have added a header to your dashboard and selected the Display In Browser When Applicable check box, you will actually see the header repeated on the screen where the page break is located. When you open the dashboard in the PDF Printer Friendly view, you will find that the pages do break in the printed dashboard. This is extremely useful when you want to display multiple charts on a dashboard on the computer screen but want to print each chart on a separate page. In Figure 4-7 I am showing a dashboard page with four columns. The Original Column is in the upper-left corner. One click of the Add Column button gives us the second column with No Break selected as the Break option. Another click of the New Column button adds a third column to the right of this column. If you then add a column break, this third column moves down to be a single column below the top two columns. One more click of the New Column button adds a column to the right of the third column. If you then add a page break with column break to this fourth column, it moves down below the third column with a page break between the third and fourth columns. This final state is what you see in the screenshot. Setting Dashboard Properties Let us return now to the first button on the Dashboard Editor toolbar. I saved the Dashboard Properties button for the end of this chapter because the properties we are modifying here affect all of the pages in the dashboard rather than each page individually. When you click the Dashboard Properties button, the Dashboard Properties window (see Figure 4-9) opens showing you two sections: General Properties and Dashboard Pages. general Properties The General Properties section of the Dashboard Properties window shows you the path to the dashboard. There is nothing you can do here to change this path. It is merely informational. Also in this section of the Dashboard Properties screen is the Description field. This is the same description that you may have entered when you created the dashboard. You can update this description here as well. Dashboard Pages The Dashboard Pages section is where you can modify page names, hide pages, delete pages, and reorder pages in your dashboard. Keep in mind that we are