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About this lesson
In this lesson, you'll learn how to use floating tiles.
Exercise files
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Quick reference
Using Floating Tiles
In this lesson, you'll learn how to use floating tiles.
When to use
Use this technique to position items on the dashboard outside of the established template areas.
Instructions
To use floating tiles, right click on an item of the Dashboard you'd like to move. Select "Floating" to make an item floating.
Move the item wherever you'd like.
You can also change how the Floating item appears by changing the Floating Order options.
Hints & tips
- Making an item "Floating" allows you to reposition items outside the normal template parameters.
- Right Click > "Floating"
- 00:04 Okay, in this video I want to talk about floating tiles.
- 00:06 And we've already kind of talked about floating tiles very briefly
- 00:09 earlier when we had these two little guys right here.
- 00:12 These are floating tiles, right?
- 00:14 So these can be moved anywhere we want.
- 00:17 Any time we want, and that's really, really cool.
- 00:21 So the nice thing about dashboards is you can create a layout, right, and
- 00:25 you can put your layouts together.
- 00:27 Here we have basically one, two, three, four things stacked around each other.
- 00:30 And you have all kinds of different options for
- 00:33 moving things like this around.
- 00:35 We just looked at images, I can make it here, here, here, right?
- 00:40 Maybe we want to kind of squeeze it over here.
- 00:43 Maybe we want it like this.
- 00:44 Maybe we want it over here.
- 00:46 And you'll get used to sort of moving the cursor around to put these exactly where
- 00:50 you want it.
- 00:50 You can see, just as I'm doing this, there's all kinds of options.
- 00:53 But let's face it, sometimes you just can't quite get something like this
- 00:58 exactly where you want it, like right there, right?
- 01:01 Sometimes you move these things around, and let's say I want it right there,
- 01:06 right at the top like this, stretching all across.
- 01:11 Try as much as I can, sometimes you can't get it to pop-up, the gray area to pop-up.
- 01:17 And it's just a hassle.
- 01:18 Floating tiles are a great way to sort of get around this.
- 01:20 Plus, you can drop things in that maybe aren't a part of your sort of
- 01:25 laid out plan, this four by four here, two by two, I guess it would be.
- 01:30 And you want to drop something around top, floating tiles are great for that.
- 01:33 So if you don't remember to make a floating tile, you just add your tile, and
- 01:37 then you just right click on it and click floating.
- 01:40 And then when you do, boom, it pops right back out.
- 01:43 So now we can grab this and move this anywhere we want.
- 01:47 And it doesn't have to fit into any one of the preset containers.
- 01:50 It can overlap several.
- 01:52 We've got these little guys down here, and
- 01:54 we're really kind of putting them with this visualization, right.
- 01:58 So maybe we would put them right here, right?
- 02:02 But you don't have to put them inside of a specific visualization or
- 02:05 inside of a specific container that's already been defined like this.
- 02:09 Like we're seeing right here with our logo, we could put it anywhere we want,
- 02:12 we could put it right in the middle, right?
- 02:14 You wanted to cover up everything here.
- 02:18 And so maybe I can move that around a little, play with it.
- 02:22 And it looks pretty good.
- 02:24 So now we have our logo right in the middle.
- 02:27 So obviously this is overlapping things, and
- 02:29 probably not something you would want to do.
- 02:31 But you could see you have complete control over exactly
- 02:34 where a floating tile goes.
- 02:36 You could have it completely cover up something if you want, right?
- 02:39 If you wanted to cover up that pie chart, and then later in your presentation,
- 02:43 sort of pull it aside.
- 02:44 Hey, look at our pie chart, you can do that.
- 02:46 Anything you want to do, very easy with floating tiles.
- 02:49 So if you've got a floating tile, and you're like, you know what,
- 02:52 we really we don't need this as a floating tile, you can click on here again,
- 02:57 the little drop down caret.
- 02:58 And you can uncheck it, and now it goes back to a regular thing that you
- 03:03 can then move back wherever you want it.
- 03:06 Let's say we want it right there.
- 03:10 Then resize this over.
- 03:12 That looks pretty good like that, or whatever you like.
- 03:15 Now you'll notice on here when we click floating and turn it into floating,
- 03:19 we can now click on here and get the floating order.
- 03:21 We can bring it to front, bring it forward, send it back, or send backward.
- 03:25 So the floating order doesn't really apply to the preset areas, right?
- 03:31 But if you had, for instance, two of these guys,
- 03:35 say if we took this guy and also made him floating, right?
- 03:40 Now we would say which one goes on top?
- 03:43 Well, we could set the floating order here to send it back.
- 03:48 And now it's behind our logo, or
- 03:51 we could set our logo as behind it, so we could send it back, boom.
- 03:56 And now it's sort of behind the text, right?
- 03:59 So let me just sort of undo that.
- 04:03 So those are floating tiles, very useful.
- 04:05 You'll use them for all kinds of different things.
- 04:07 And just get in the habit of playing around with this.
- 04:09 And sort of learning how to make these look the way you want them to look.
- 04:12 You have all kinds of different options, especially with the floating tiles, and
- 04:15 it's pretty cool.
- 04:16 So that's all for this video.
- 04:17 In the next video, we'll look at how to add a web page to our dashboard.
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