Using Floating Tiles

Quick reference

• 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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