By John Leahy

Creating a dashboard in IBM Planning Analytics is designed to be easy enough for casual users to build their own dashboards and share them with other users. Dashboards can be created by clicking on the “New” button in the center of the workspace. Then the user can create a new book from a template or from a blank canvas.

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Once a user has selected to create a new book, they are presented with a blank canvas. They can manually select TM1 application items, cubes, cube views, dimensions, or application web URLs to add to their workspace.

A user can expand the servers they want to pull content from and drag the items onto the workspace and position them where they want. Multiple items can be pulled onto the workspace and positioned as the user prefers.

In this example we have added a TM1 websheet to the workspace by dragging and dropping it. Any item on the workspace can be positioned by the user and resized to the view they prefer.

Cube views can be added by dragging them onto the workspace and positioning them. Multiple objects can be added to the workspace from different servers and visualized quickly in a variety of ways.

Once a user is satisfied with the workspace they can name the sheet, save it, collaborate with others and add threaded conversations.

Entire cubes can be added to the workspace. In this example, the user has added a second sheet and dragged the Revenue cube onto the workspace. All dimensions are available to reorient and slice and dice the data.

Any item in the workspace can be visualized in various ways. In the example below, the user has clicked on the visualizations from the content pop-up menu and the recommended visualizations are presented.

The user has selected a bubble chart as the visualization of the Revenue cube and they have selected an exploration grid as the visualization for the Income Statement cube view.

The user has easily created 2 dashboards using various TM1 objects and can navigate between these dashboards by clicking on the named tabs in the upper right section of the workspace. These can be shared with other users by simply selecting which users have access to this content. Comments and threaded conversations are also available to allow deep collaboration on content among users.