Dashboard

A dashboard room is a drag-and-resize reporting canvas. You place widgets on it — stat tiles, progress bars, bar and donut charts, recent-cards tables — and wire them to your table and kanban boards. Because the widgets read live from the boards, the dashboard you build once stays accurate as work moves: when a deal changes stage or a card closes, the numbers follow.

Creating dashboard rooms requires the Pro plan. On the Free plan, any dashboards you already have stay readable — you just can't create new ones until you upgrade.

Create a dashboard room

Open your space's sidebar, click +, and pick the dashboard room type. Like any room, you choose its visibility as you create it: open to everyone in the space, or restricted to certain people. A leadership-only dashboard and a team-wide one can sit side by side in the same space.

Add and arrange widgets

Building a dashboard is a three-step loop: pick a widget, point it at a data source, and place it on the canvas. Drag widgets anywhere and resize them until the layout tells its story — there's no fixed grid and no query language to learn.

The widget types cover the standard reporting jobs:

• Stat tiles put headline numbers front and center.
• Progress bars track goals toward a target.
• Bar and donut charts break work down by status, owner, or group.
• Recent-cards tables surface the latest cards from a board, so the report links straight to the actual work.
• Manual-data widgets chart numbers you enter by hand — for figures that live outside your boards, like revenue.
• Text widgets add the context, targets, and commentary that make the numbers readable.

Wire widgets to your data

Board-wired widgets connect directly to your table and kanban boards and update automatically — no exports, no screenshots, no Friday copy-paste ritual. This is the main reason to build trackers as boards rather than spreadsheets: typed columns (status, people, dates) are what make the charts draw themselves.

Widgets can also pull from external connections — for example Jira, Azure DevOps, or a REST endpoint — and those refresh on a schedule, so numbers from outside Openbook stay reasonably current without anyone re-entering them.

For anything that has no live source at all, use a manual-data widget and update the value yourself when it changes.

Tips

• Lay the dashboard out top to bottom in the order a reader would ask questions: headline tiles first, breakdowns next, detail tables last.
• Mix sources freely. A department overview works well with board charts next to manually entered figures.
• Put a dashboard on a shared screen in the team room — because it's live, it's never out of date.
• If a number is hard to chart, check the board behind it. A status column holding real states charts far better than free text that merely looks like a status.

FAQ

Does the dashboard update on its own? Board-wired widgets update as the boards change, and external connections refresh on their schedule. Only manual-data widgets need a human touch.

Do I need to be technical to build one? No. It's drag, resize, and point-at-a-board. If you can arrange slides, you can build a dashboard.

What happens to our dashboards if we drop to the Free plan? They remain readable. Creating new dashboard rooms is gated to Pro.

Where should the underlying data live? In table or kanban boards for anything your team tracks day to day, in external connections for systems like Jira, and in manual-data widgets for the rest.