CRMA Academy

Linking Dashboards Together

Use the CRM Analytics link widget to connect dashboards, lenses, and URLs — carry the user's current filters across with apply selections, style links as tabs, and build clickable image tiles with a transparent link over a container.

Linking Dashboards Together

One dashboard can't answer everything. Try and you get a scrolling monster nobody reads. The better pattern is a set of focused dashboards — a summary, a pipeline detail, an activity view — connected so the user moves between them without ever touching the navigation menu.

The link widget is how you build that, and it does considerably more than open a URL.

What a link can point to

Drag a link widget onto the canvas and its properties ask for a destination. You have three choices:

A saved dashboard

Pick any dashboard in the org from a picker. The most common option, and the only one that supports carrying filters across.

A lens

Send the user into an exploration for ad-hoc slicing beyond what the dashboard exposes.

A URL

Anything else — a Salesforce record page, a report, a Confluence runbook, an external tool.

You also control whether the target opens in the same tab or a new one. Same tab for a drill-down that's part of the flow; new tab for reference material the user will come back from.

Carrying filters across

This is the setting that makes links genuinely powerful, and the one most people leave switched off because they never noticed it.

Enable apply selections / apply filters on the link, and the user's current dashboard state travels with them. If they've filtered to EMEA, Q3, and closed-won, they land on the target dashboard already filtered to EMEA, Q3, and closed-won.

Without it, the journey is: filter carefully, click through, re-apply all the same filters, lose your train of thought. With it, the two dashboards feel like one application with two views.

  1. 1

    Drag a link widget onto the canvas

    Place it where the user will look for it — usually a header strip or beside the chart it drills from.

  2. 2

    Choose the destination

    Select a saved dashboard, a lens, or paste a URL.

  3. 3

    Enable apply selections

    Switch on the option that passes the current filters and selections to the target.

  4. 4

    Set the link text

    Label it with the destination and its purpose — 'Pipeline Detail', not 'Click here'.

  5. 5

    Test with filters applied

    Filter the source dashboard, click through, and confirm the target opens already filtered.

Filters only carry across cleanly when the target dashboard has compatible filters on a dataset with the same field names. Link a pipeline dashboard to a support dashboard on a completely different dataset and the selections have nothing to bind to. Design linked dashboards as a family from the start, on shared datasets and shared field naming, and this just works.

Styling a link like a tab

A link widget accepts the same styling as any other widget — background colour, font, border radius, padding. Put a row of them across the top of the dashboard, give them a filled background and a rounded top edge, and you have something the user reads unmistakably as tabs.

Highlight the current one (a stronger background, or the brand colour) and grey the others, and a set of four dashboards behaves like a four-tab application. It's entirely cosmetic — there's no real tab component underneath — but users don't know that and don't need to. It's one of the highest-impact bits of styling available, because navigation is where most dashboard sets fall down.

Keep the strip identical

Same links, same order, same position on every dashboard in the set. Navigation that moves between pages feels broken.

Mark the current page

Style the active dashboard's own link differently so the user always knows where they are.

The transparent link over a container

Now the trick worth stealing. A link widget renders as text, and sometimes you want a clickable image instead — a product tile, a team photo, a branded card that opens the relevant dashboard.

There's no image-button widget. You fake one convincingly:

  1. 1

    Drop a container widget

    Place a container on the canvas and size it to the tile you want.

  2. 2

    Give it a background image

    In the container's properties, set a background image and choose how it fits — cover usually looks best.

  3. 3

    Overlay a link widget

    Drag a link widget on top of the container so it covers the same area exactly.

  4. 4

    Make the link invisible

    Set the link's background colour to fully transparent and its font colour to fully transparent as well.

  5. 5

    Point it at the destination

    Set the target dashboard and enable apply selections, then test that the whole tile clicks through.

The result is an image the user clicks. The link is still there, doing its job, carrying its filters — it just has nothing visible to render. Both the background and the font colour need to go transparent; leave the text opaque and you get a stray word floating over your picture.

Because the invisible link gives no hover feedback, add the affordance yourself: a subtle border on the container, a caption underneath, or a tooltip on the link explaining where it goes. An image that turns out to be clickable is a nice surprise; an image that looks clickable and is one is good design.

Use this for a landing page — a grid of image tiles, each opening a different area of the business. It takes two widgets per tile and it makes an analytics app feel like a product rather than a folder of reports.

Where this leaves you

You've now got the full design toolkit: colour that carries meaning, filters that are one click away, tables that show faces, charts that explain themselves, a KPI band that answers the headline question, and navigation that holds a set of dashboards together.

Test what stuck with the graded quiz, and rehearse the interview questions to be ready to talk about these choices out loud.

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