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Widgets are the building blocks of a dashboard. Each tile placed on the canvas in the dashboard builder is a widget — a chart, a block of text, a control that viewers interact with, an AI-generated summary, or a layout element such as a spacer, divider, stack, grid, or tabs container. Combine them to assemble polished, interactive views of your data.

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Widget types

The dashboard builder supports the following widget types:
  • Charts — Visualize reports from your workbook
  • Text — Add titles, descriptions, and rich formatting in Markdown
  • Controls — Let viewers filter the data, switch the time granularity, swap which field the charts are built on, or drive several controls at once
  • AI summary — Generate narrative summaries of dashboard data on demand
  • Spacer, Divider, Stack, Grid & Tabs — Non-data layout elements for whitespace, section breaks, and grouping widgets

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Adding widgets

Add widgets from the toolbar at the top of the dashboard builder, in the order the buttons sit there: pick reports from the Charts picker to add charts, then Add Controls for Filter, Time Granularity, Field Switcher and Parent controls, Add Containers for Tabs, Horizontal stack, Vertical stack and Grid, and Add Other Widgets for Text, Analysis (the AI summary widget), Spacer and Divider. Each item — a toolbar button, or an option inside the Add Controls, Add Containers or Add Other Widgets menus — can be added in two ways:
  • Click it to drop the widget into the first open spot on the canvas.
  • Drag it from the toolbar onto the canvas to place it exactly where you want. As you drag, a full-size placeholder previews the widget’s footprint and the surrounding widgets reflow to open a slot; release to drop it there. Dragging is especially handy on dense dashboards, where clicking would otherwise place the new widget far down the page.
Starting a drag from a menu option closes the menu, so it doesn’t cover the canvas while you place the widget.

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Widget size

Widgets are sized in the dashboard’s grid cells. Each type is added at its own size on a 12-column dashboard, and has a minimum it can’t be dragged below: A KPI chart is added smaller, at 3×3, and carries the same minimum as any other chart. A control resizes by width only — its height is fixed by the input it renders — and never narrows below 2 columns. The layout widgets carry their own sizes, listed on their page. A minimum only constrains a resize you make in the builder. A dashboard that already stores a widget smaller than its minimum keeps that size — in the builder and on the published dashboard alike — until you resize that widget yourself. The board’s edge outranks a minimum too, so a widget with less room than its minimum between it and the right edge is held to the room it has rather than pushed off the board.

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Arranging widgets

Drag any widget to move it, and use the handle in its bottom-right corner to resize it — the surrounding widgets shift to make room. To work with several widgets at once, select them first:
  • Click a widget to select it.
  • Shift-click to add widgets to, or remove them from, the selection.
  • Drag a marquee — press on any empty part of the canvas and drag a rectangle over the widgets you want; every widget it touches is selected.
With a selection in place:
  • Move the group — drag any selected widget and the whole selection moves together, keeping its relative arrangement.
  • Delete the group — press Delete or Backspace to remove every selected widget at once. If the selection holds a container that still has widgets in it, Cube asks you to confirm first.