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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.