How to customise dashboard design and styling (Dashboard Builder)

 

In this guide, you’ll learn how to customise your dashboard design and styling, including how to apply themes, adjust colours and fonts, and fine-tune legends and tooltips for a polished, professional look.

 

You can adjust the design and styling for your entire dashboard, as well as for individual charts.

 

Customising the overall dashboard design

To customise your overall dashboard appearance:

1. Open Settings

   • Click Settings on the right-hand side of the screen.

   • Add a title and subtitle to your dashboard if you’d like them displayed.

2. Choose a theme

   • Scroll down to the Theme section.

   • Select one of the pre-made themes, or choose Custom theme to create your own. For example, you may wish to make a theme to match your organisation's brand colours.

3. Adjust your custom theme
   When you select Custom theme, extra options appear below. You can:

   • Change the background colour of the dashboard and items.

   • Select the font used across charts and text.

   • Adjust the main colour that appears in your graphs.

   • Change the colour palette for multi-coloured charts

   • Edit the corner rounding of chart items.

   • Change the title size and line height.

   • Choose whether text is left or right aligned.

   • Increase or decrease the spacing between items.

   • Customise item borders for finer control over layout.

4. Adjust tooltip styles
   If you’ve added tooltips to graphs, you can also change:

   • Font

   • Background colour (for example, red)

   • Font size
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5. Switch back to a pre-made theme
   Once you’ve finished experimenting, you can revert to a ready-made theme at any time, for example by switching back to the Vivid theme.

These settings help maintain a consistent and readable dashboard design.

 

Customising individual charts and filters

You can also customise settings for individual charts and filters, and add tooltips to help users understand what each chart shows.

 

To do this:

1. Hover over a chart.

2. Click the Settings toggle.

3. The sidebar will show options specific to that chart type. For example, bar charts, pie charts, and tables each have different options.

Example: editing a pie chart

To customise a pie chart:

1. Hover over the chart and click Settings.

2. Choose how you want the chart displayed:

   • Pie or Donut

   • Half or Full circle

3. Add and adjust elements:

   • Add a title

   • Show or hide the legend and labels

   • Sort slices by category or measure

   • Display values, percentages, or hide them entirely

4. Manage charts with a large number of categories:

   • Set a maximum number of slices

   • Use Group slices under percentage to combine less frequently used categories for a cleaner look

5. Refine visual layout:

   • Round slice corners

   • Move the legend to a new position

   • Add a tooltip to explain the chart or data

   • Choose where the tooltip appears on the chart

Setting chart interactions

You can control what happens when users click on a chart.

• Set an action such as opening a specific URL when a user clicks a slice.

• Or use the default setting to filter the dashboard by that value.

For example, if someone clicks on a slice labelled Insufficient space, the dashboard automatically updates to show only data for that category. This helps users explore data visually and efficiently.

 

Applying themes to individual charts

You can apply a different theme to specific charts if you’d like them to stand out:

1. Open the chart’s Settings panel.

2. Go to the Theme dropdown.

3. Change from Inherit to another theme, for example Pinky Brain.

This is useful if you want to highlight key charts or apply a distinct style while keeping the rest of the dashboard consistent.

 

Summary

You’ve now learned how to:

• Customise your dashboard’s overall theme, colours, and fonts

• Adjust spacing, borders, and tooltips

• Edit individual chart settings and add tooltips

• Define chart interactions

• Apply unique themes to specific charts

In the next article, you’ll learn how to restore dashboards through version history.