Phocas has a new user documentation site. This site will be retired soon.

Filter dashboard data (focus on an item)

Owned by Denise McGettigan
Last updated: Jan 19, 2024
3 min read

In interactive dashboards, you can select and focus on specific data, such as a region, customer or product, to get quick answers and insights. The data items you select can be a segment of a chart or a row in a grid. A filter is applied to the dashboard to remove the unselected data from the widgets that share the selected data items. As a result, those widgets update to display only the data you are interested in. The unrelated widgets are not filtered.

If you are the owner of a dashboard (you created it), you can set the order in which the filters are applied. You can also remove the ability for users to filter widgets. See Customize a dashboard.

Apply a filter

Suppose you are looking at a dashboard in which no filters have been applied. You are interested in the sales rep performance. The Total revenue value in the top-left widget (underlined in red) includes revenue from all customers. You want to focus on the revenue earned in a specific customer segment, so you need to apply a filter.

  1. Select the item you want to focus on. In this example, you select the Manufacturing segment in the Customer Type pie chart.

  2. Click the Focus button at the top left of the dashboard. The filter displays at the top of the dashboard in the status bar, and all the widgets that have been filtered have a small filter icon next to their title.

 

You can hover over a filter in the status bar to display a tooltip listing your focused selections, filters and so on.

Apply multiple filters

Suppose you want to filter a dashboard to focus on the data related to a specific sales rep and customer.

  1. Select the items you want to focus on. In this example, you select sales rep Shelly and customer D&R Henderson.

  2. Click the Focus button at the top left of the dashboard. The filters display at the top of the dashboard in the status bar, and all the widgets that have been filtered have a small filter icon next to their title.

Remove a filter

Either click the X on the filter or click the Reset button.