Dashboard Dials – In Style

Traditional KPIs in a Dashboard

Cradle has supported KPIs being shown in the sidebar of WorkBench or Web Access for a number of years. This gives a quick overview of the health of the project. It’s giving a rating for each of the measurements and coloured highlighting to draw attention to those areas that need further input.

Showing the KPIs in a traditional dashboard table in sidebar
Traditional Dashboard

Due to its compactness, this table style allows many KPIs to be shown in a small space. However, one of the limitations with this approach is that the scale of the measurement and the relative position of the current value are not immediately obvious.

Bring on the Dials

A dial on the other-hand can display the full range, and the relative position. This allows a much faster assimilation of the data being shown to the user.

showing different sizes for dashboard dials
Dashboard Dial Sizes

New Cradle 7.2 Dashboard Dials Feature

Cradle’s dashboard dials are available in a number of sizes, thus allowing more important dials to be clearly seen. The size is set per dial as:

  • Large
  • Medium
  • Small
  • Minimal

There are also a number of styles available for the dashboard as a whole:

  • Round 270°
  • Round 180°
  • Round 140°
  • Text

These can be displayed with the following pointer types:

  • None
  • Triangle
  • Stick
  • Needle
  • Coloured
showing the different dial and pointer styles
Dashboard Styles

It’s also possible to print these dials to the standard Cradle outputs:

  • SVG (for display in a browser),
  • RTF (for display in Microsoft® Word and similar),
  • PostScript®
  • PowerPoint®
  • EPS
  • FrameMaker®
  • HPGL
Showing an rtf version of the dashboard dials
Dashboard RTF Output