An important but often neglected aspect of Pages is their appearance. Whether your audience is your colleagues or your customers, how your Page looks actually contributes to its function. An attractive and professional-looking Page makes it more engaging - it ensures you effectively get your message across. Elements like a clear title, legends and instructions make it easier for your audience to understand the key takeaways.
It's important therefore to think about:
Add section titles
Add instructions or context for the viewer via text boxes or videos
Add your own logo and brand colours
Format your charts widgets by adding colours
How to make your Page look its best
There are a variety of widgets and functionality you can use for better presentation: from simple text or media widgets to page backgrounds. Let's dive in!
Add Text
Of course, there is a simple text widget, which can be invaluable for structuring your Page or adding extra context. For example:
Add titles or subtitles
Add instructions on how a viewer should use the Page (e.g. what parts to fill in)
Add extra context to the data widgets in the Page - make sure it’s really clear to the audience what each widget is showing and what your conclusions are
Add static text-based targets next to a KPI widget
You can easily edit the text in a Text widget with standard options such as bold, italic underline, font type, text size and text colour.
Add an Image (e.g. a logo)
As you can imagine, images are a great way to add colour and design to your Page. One of the most powerful ways to do this is by adding elements of your organisation’s branding to make it feel like a cohesive part of your own content, rather than something separate and generic. This might be a logo added to each slide, or a brand image to serve as background.
There are three different ways you can upload images to your Page:
Add a link to an image that’s hosted elsewhere online
Upload an image from your computer
Pick from a library of images created by Planhat
In addition to uploading your own images, there are some great sample images in the Planhat library that you can use as a slide background.
🚀 Pro tip: “Lock Widget” - right-click on a widget to lock it. Once locked, you won’t be able to select, remove or move it - even in edit mode. This is perfect for background images as it means they can’t be accidentally moved or deleted. If you do decide later on that you need to change it, simply right-click again to unlock it.
🤓 Smart hack: Create an Image Library Page! Marketing can upload your organisation’s logos, branding elements etc. to this Page and share with your whole team. When your team are creating their own Pages, they can copy/paste the images from this library Page into their own Page, rather than having to upload each individual image - saving you time!
Add a video
Videos can be a fantastic way to engage with your audience in a dynamic way. For example:
Add a "Welcome video" to a Page, and share it with your Customers via the Customer Portal
Add an instructional video for your low touch customers in Onboarding, sharing it on the Customer Portal so they can do more without needing hand holding
Add an instructional video to an internal Page that shows how team members should use the Page - e.g. how to filter on their own Portfolio and complete missing data fields
You can either add a link to a video hosted elsewhere (such as a YouTube video), or upload a video from your computer.
Add a PDF document
Self-explanatory, this widget allows you to upload a PDF and embed it in your Page. This is another way you can add branded instructions or product information to your Page.
An alternative use case for PDF widgets is versioning. If you regularly hold QBRs for each Company, for example, you can print the Page slides to PDF (click on the three vertical dots in the top right and click “Print”), and then upload that PDF on your Page to share the copy with the Customer.
Add a Page background
You’ve seen how you can select an image to be your Page background. An alternative to this is to apply a simple colour to the background. To do this, right-click anywhere on the Page, and then click on “Set page background”. Select a palette from the drop-down at the top, click on your chosen colour and “Save”.
If your Page is in presentation format, this will only affect the slide you right-clicked. You can give different slides different background colours if you wish.
Format your widgets
You can format your widgets to fit your design and brand colours too! If you select any widget (in edit mode), you will see a formatting menu appear. Let's have a look at some of the options here.
Widget colours
As a default, both chart and text widget will have a transparent background colour, but here's where you can change it to whatever you like. Select your colour palette and colour of choice and voila!
For chart widgets, the palette you select will also affect the colours in the chart - such as the bar colour in a bar chart, or the colours of the segments in a pie chart. You can select a colour from “Start Palette From”, and see how it affects the colours in your chart. Note that within a widget’s edit menu, there can be more options to set colours - for example, Pie Charts and Stacked Time Series Bars, allow you to define custom segments and apply colours to them.
Widget formatting
Under "Shape", you'll find a number of additional options to edit the design of your widgets:
“Drop Shadow” - This 3D effect adds a shadow and makes your widget really stand out! Choose from “Light”, “Medium” and “Strong”
“Border Style” - You can add a solid, dashed or dotted border. If you select one of these from the drop-down, additional options appear at the bottom, where you can choose the border width and colour
“Border Radius” - This determines whether the widget has square or rounded corners - the higher the setting, the more rounded your borders will be
“Padding” - This influences how much space or padding there will be around your chart or text
Add Names and Descriptions to your chart widgets
Name: This is the title of your chart. It’s important to add a title to make it clear what your chart is showing; for example, this could be “Top 5 Companies by ARR”, or “Conversations split by Type”.
If you would like more choice in how the chart title is formatted (e.g. different font size), you could use a text widget instead.
Description: We recommend always adding a description to make it very clear what you are displaying in each widget. The description will be added as a tooltip, only visible when hovering over the "i" symbol.
Alternatively, if you would like the description to be bigger and not hidden behind a tooltip, you could use a text widget (text box).
Show or hide the Legend:
You can turn it the legend (key) of a graph on or off with a toggle switch. For each of your chart widgets, think about whether the chart shows all the necessary information, or not. For example:
If you have a Pie Chart or a Vertical Stacked Bar, for example, the viewer can only see what the segments or bars correspond to if they hover over that segment, so a legend would be beneficial
In a simple Vertical Bar, the legend duplicates the x axis bar labels, so it's generally not useful
Add Reference Values
For bar charts, you can add one or more reference values. These are targets or benchmarks. For example, if you have a chart showing the sum of Churn ARR, you might add a reference value that’s your target to stay under. Or, if you have a usage dashboard you’re showing to a Company, you might add a reference value showing the industry average usage. You get the idea.
And there you go! You now have all the knowledge to be able to create a gorgeous-looking Page that effectively gets your message across. To find out how best to share your Page with your audience, continue reading here.
Go forth and spread that message!