CRMA Academy

Designing Dashboards in CRM Analytics

Move past the default look and craft dashboards people actually enjoy using — conditional formatting, toggle filters, values tables, tooltips, chart markers, KPI micro charts, and links between dashboards.

Designing Dashboards in CRM Analytics

You can build a functional CRM Analytics dashboard in about ten minutes. Drag a few charts on, wire up a filter, save. It works. It also looks like every other dashboard in the org, and nobody opens it twice.

This section is about the other 90% — the widget craft that turns a working dashboard into one an executive keeps pinned. None of it is hard. It's mostly a matter of knowing which property panel holds the setting you want, and having seen the trick once before.

What "design" means here

Design in CRM Analytics is not about picking prettier colors. It's about reducing the distance between a question and its answer. Every technique in this section does one of three things:

Make meaning instant

Conditional formatting, chart markers, and micro charts let a reader see good, bad, and trending without reading a single number.

Make filtering effortless

Toggles, faceting control, and carried-over selections mean the user changes the view with one click instead of five.

Make context available

Custom tooltips, images in tables, and links to related dashboards put the supporting detail one hover or one click away.

What's ahead in this section

We'll work through the widget properties in the order you'd naturally reach for them while polishing a real dashboard:

  1. 1

    Conditional formatting

    Colour a measure by threshold — bins, labels, gradients — on charts, tables, and number widgets.

  2. 2

    Date toggles and faceting

    Build clean toggle filters over date parts, and control faceting so the options don't vanish as users click.

  3. 3

    Tables, images, and themes

    Values tables, default columns, spacing, dark widget themes, and rendering URL fields as real images.

  4. 4

    Tooltips and chart markers

    Customise what a hover reveals, add interpolated custom text, and pin annotations to specific data points.

  5. 5

    KPI micro charts

    Build that top row of indicators — timelines, projected lines, polar gauges, and formatted number widgets.

  6. 6

    Linking dashboards

    Link widgets that carry the user's filters across, plus the transparent-link-over-image tile trick.

Before you start experimenting, clone your dashboard. CRM Analytics has no meaningful undo once you've saved, and half of design work is trying something, hating it, and backing out. A throwaway copy makes you brave. We show the clone-to-a-new-tab flow in the KPI lesson.

By the end you'll have a vocabulary of small, reusable moves you can apply to any dashboard you inherit. First up, the one that pays off fastest: conditional formatting.

Discussion

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Interview Questions

Rehearse common CRM Analytics interview questions on lenses and Explorer mode, apps and the sharing model, values vs compare vs pivot tables, dataset field metadata, and hand-editing SAQL.

Conditional Formatting

Colour a CRM Analytics measure by threshold. Define bins, set the cut-off values, assign red/yellow/green, rename the labels to Low/Medium/High, and choose between discrete bins and a continuous gradient.