This page outlines best practices to be used for emailing reports from the Analytics Portal.
It’s important to note before following this document that the Analytics Portal stores user filters; this is done to improve user experience.
When creating Dashboard for email distribution, the Shoplogix requirements are:
There is only one Owner/Designer of the Dashboard, everyone else has viewer access only.
Dedicate a folder to emailed Dashboards and manage accordingly
Dashboards for general use should not be stored in the same folder as emailed Dashboards
Dedicate emailed Dashboards
If emailed Dashboards are required to be available for general use to viewers, then please duplicate and share
User filters are stored to the user and emails will take these filters into consideration upon email execution
Allowing filtering on email dashboards can result in the email being received with unexpected data
Create Dashboard and filters as required
Lock the Filters on the Dashboard
You can access the filter options by selecting the menu option highlights in red below
Lock the Filters on the Dashboard
Once you lock the filters, you will see both a 🔒 icon greyed out, and the actual filter value greyed out.
Lock all the Filters on the Dashboard
Once you lock all of the filters, you will see both a 🔒 icon greyed out, and the actual filter value greyed out.
Assign these as your default filters by selecting ‘Set as My Default Filters’
A reload icon will appear once you have done this, which would be used to reset to default filters if required
Once all of the Filters are set as required and locked, you can then begin to share the Dashboard with other users.
“Can View” = Sharing Only
Email Settings
Enable or disable “Users cannot change their subscription settings” here
Emails can be sent as:
Embedded: Snapshot of the dashboard is embedded directly into the email
PDF: A PDF attachment of the dashboard is emailed to recipients
PDF Design
PDF can be optimally resized and redesigned by clicking “Edit/View PDF Report”
Toggle to “Edit Mode” to manually edit the size of widgets in the PDF:
If some of your widgets are cut off in Portrait Orientation, try changing the Orientation of the PDF to “Landscape”:
For optimal sizing and fit of pivot tables, Shoplogix recommends the following:
Do not have more than one table side-by-side on your Dashboard
Limit the number of columns in a pivot table, so they will fit on your browser window. If you need more columns than will fit to the browser and you need to print to PDF, Shoplogix recommends creating 2 pivot tables
Within a pivot table widget, set the limit of data shown in your table to the maximum number of results that you need:
In the above example, results are limited to the top 10 by OEE.
Tip: If you want a full printout of items, then within the widget change “Items per page”; the maximum limit is 200.
Tip: You can manually resize column widths of widgets by dragging their borders on the dashboard, or drag the title of a widget to move the entire widget around the dashboard.
Note: Editing your dashboard layout by adding, removing, and moving widgets will result in the PDF settings being lost; You will need to re-edit the PDF settings after making dashboard changes.
Timing / Scheduling
Shoplogix recommends that you schedule emails to be sent 1 hour after the last shift ends that you would like to be included in that report.
See Working with Shift and Time Data for more on how to work with Shift and Time Data.
Widget Limits
The recommended limit for widgets per dashboard is 12. This is to prevent an emailed dashboard from getting too large and failing to send.
Time Stamps
Please note that the time stamps for cube updates and emailed reports are in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is 4 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time (EST). Development has been asked to look into adding GMT directly into Analytics Portal and emailed reports so cube update times are self explanatory internally and to our customers.
