A dashboard is a set of reports that appears in its own window, outside of Reporting4Act!. In fact, when a dashboard is run, the normal Reporting4Act! user interface doesn't appear.

You typically run a dashboard to view important information about your business. You may run a dashboard at the start of the day and leave the dashboard window open all day, or open and close it as you see fit. The reports in the dashboard refresh themselves at an interval you specify (the default is every ten minutes) so the data is always current.

If the total number of cells in the dashboard is less than the number of reports, the reports are cycled through in sets at the specified interval. For example, if you specify two rows and two columns, only four reports can be displayed at a time, so if the dashboard contains six reports, the first four are displayed, then the next two, then the first four again.

To run a dashboard, double-click the shortcut on your desktop Reporting4Act! created when you created the dashboard. Resizing the dashboard window resizes the reports within the window so you can make the window a convenient size. Each report in the dashboard displays with a title bar that changes color when your mouse pointer is over the chart. There are three controls in the upper-left corner of each report's title bar:

• : click this button to output the reports to a PDF file. You are asked for the name and location of the file to output to.

• : click this button, which only appears when there's more than one report in the dashboard, to zoom the report up to fill the dashboard and hide the other reports. Click it again to restore the size of the report.

• : click this button to refresh the report immediately without waiting for the refresh interval.

You can also run a dashboard by previewing it in Reporting4Act!, either in the Reports Explorer or in the Dashboard Wizard. Note that the Print, Schedule Report, and Show SQL Statement functions are disabled, as are all pages in the Reports Explorer except the Information page, when a dashboard is selected since those things don't apply to dashboards.

Note that reports such as quick or cross-tab reports only display the first page of the report and cannot be scrolled, since a dashboard is intended to show a quick display of information.

To create a dashboard, follow the steps in the Creating a Report topic. The Dashboard Wizard shown below appears.

You can resize the Dashboard Wizard window by clicking the lower right corner of the window and dragging until the window is the desired size. Reporting4Act! remembers the size and position of the Dashboard Wizard and restores it the next time you run it.