Pages enable you to tell stories with your data and present it in a range of ways to different audiences, be they internal or external. This article provides a guide to help you create beautiful Pages and gain awesome insights!
A Depending on your Planhat plan, you can build Pages in both the Customer Intelligence module and on Company Profiles. The UI is the same for building both, but how the data is filtered is different. You can learn more here.
Getting Started
The first question to ask when creating a Page is whether you want a Canvas style or Presentation style. Here's a quick summary of each.
Canvas
With a Canvas your Page has an "infinite scroll". Think about it like one long piece of paper on which you can draw anything you like, from bar charts to text boxes to embedded videos.
Canvases are great to deep dive into a continuous topic and give you total freedom on where you put your different elements and how you tell your story.
Presentation
Presentations imitate a Powerpoint or GoogleSlide deck, providing landscape oriented 'slides' you can use to break up a story. In full screen mode you can then present just as you would a traditional slide deck.
Presentations are great, as you might expect, for when you need to present the data! An EBR deck or Exec Team / Board deck are great examples of when to use Presentation style Pages.
Creating a Page
Navigate to Customer Intelligence and click the + sign at the top of the page. You can select from a library of pre-built Pages from the menu that shows, or create your own Page from scratch.
Adding Elements to a Page
There is a broad menu of Elements you can add to a Page, from embedded videos to bar charts. If your Element involves data, you will broadly follow the same process every time, with slight deviations based on the Element type. (For example a stacked bar chart has one more dimension than a standard bar chart).
Select the Element type from the menu
Draw where you want the Element to appear. (you can move it later)
Give the Element a name (this is not mandatory)
Choose the Data Model you are working with.
Choose the data you want the chart to represent
Choose how you want to group or split the data.
Choose how you want to Filter the data in the chart.
Choose from the other options to customise the chart display.
Here is a video with a simple example showing the creation of a Donut chart.
This is a more complex example. Here we are creating a multi-bar chart and customising it to get the right view of data, and adding a data table alongside to get a better view of the data.
📌 Note: Pages and their elements don't support Revenue Reporting (that's what the Revenue Module is for!). This is because FX rates and ARR/MRR switching isn't available in these charts. Consequently, if you try to model revenue data (perhaps using an input like "Renewal ARR"), revenue figures will look off, especially when using the license object.
Data Settings
When creating your Element there are a number of operators you can choose from to present data how you need. In addition, depending on your chart type, you will see options to Split and Group data. Definitions of each are as follows:
When would you use: Avg (all) & Avg (values)?
Let's say you have 4 customers:
Health score = 4
Health score = 8
Health score = 6
Health score = - (i.e., no health score)
If you want to see the average health score of those 4 customers, then you can have two types of averages:
Avg (all): looks at the average of all your customers, so (4 + 8 + 6) / 4 = 4.5
Avg (values): looks at the average of the customers with a value, so (4 + 8 + 6) / 3 = 6
When would you use one or the other?:
Avg (all): gives you the view of the entire portfolio, even including those who aren't using/doing what you are looking at at all (so e.g., "average activity per user" and then including those who aren't active at all) -> avg will always be lower
Avg (values): only looks at those who are "active" within the topic -> avg will be higher
Split by: this is where you decide how you want to split your data. For example, I want to display a count of companies split by the account owner. To do this, I select my chart type, connect to the Company data object, select the Value "Count" and then "Split by" > "Owner".
Group by: "Group by" is used when you want to display multiple data points on a chart. The "Group by" option allows you to group by a field from the data object that you initially selected. There are several chart types in Planhat that have the "Group by" feature and these are:
• Bar Chart (multi horizontal)
• Bar Chart (stacked)
• Bar Chart (multi)
• Cohort Bar Chart
• Cohort Line Chart
For example, you want to display CSM score split by Account Owner and Tier. You select one of the chart types from the list above, select "Company" data, split by "Owner", and group by "Tier".
📌 Note: Avoid using "Split by" and "Group by" with time-varying inputs like "Phase" or "Stage". Though they'll be split accurately at the moment of creation, as the Phase or Stage status changes over time, they'll become misclassified, deprecating the chart.
Layering Elements
As has become common in presentation tools, you can layer Elements on top of one another to create multi-dimensional views in Pages. Layering data helps with story telling and provides additional levels of insight - done well it is engaging, done poorly it can be overwhelming. Here is an example where we layer a KPI in the middle of the Donut chart to provide a little more insight.
📣 Pro tip: Use Shift + arrow to move an Element more precisely
Working with Media Elements
There are many types of Elements in Pages (and always more being added). As you can see they are very easy to use and manipulate. In this example we embed a video to add further insight to the dashboard. A great use case is sharing Pages with customers and including videos about Product releases.
Element Settings
Once you create an Element you can left click on it to see the underlying data (this applies to most but not all Element types), or right click to edit the widget. Right clicking will bring up a range of options to choose from.
Page Modes and Settings
Page settings are largely controlled in the top right corner. There are two modes to Pages, Edit Mode and View Mode. Each mode has its own Settings menu and can do different things.
🚀 Quick tip: you need to be in edit mode to edit or add Elements on a Page.
In this video you can see us toggle between Edit and View mode and show the different options. In View mode you can switch to a full screen view as if you were presenting to a live audience.
There are a lot of other features involved in Pages but we believe this is a summary of the key things you need to design and build the majority. In addition Pages re-uses a number of UI features you will already know from across Planhat such as the Search Bar and Filters, so it will quickly become a familiar experience.