Getting Around Your Dashboard: the Nav Bar, Edit Mode and the Multi-Select Bar
Introduction
Every Qvasa dashboard has one dark nav bar across the top. It holds everything you do to the dashboard as a whole: renaming it, opening its settings, refreshing, presenting and editing. When you start editing, the multi-select bar lets you change many widgets at once, including filters and settings for a whole tab or every tab.
This guide walks through the nav bar from left to right, then edit mode, then the multi-select bar.
Before You Begin
Anyone who can open a dashboard sees the nav bar.
Edit, the multi-select bar and Apply settings need edit access to the dashboard. The items in the Settings menu follow your permissions, so you may see fewer of them than shown here.
Step 1: The Nav Bar, Left to Right
Breadcrumb and name. The chart icon takes you back to your dashboards. Hover the ⓘ next to the name to read the dashboard's description. In edit mode, click the name to rename the dashboard right there.
Settings opens the dashboard's settings menu (Step 2).
Edit turns on edit mode (Step 3).
Refresh reloads every widget. The button beside it turns on Auto Refresh, and Present shows the dashboard full screen.
Refreshed … tells you when the data was last refreshed. The counts after it show widgets Loaded, Loading and Queued; hover them for an explanation. The dashboard loads up to 10 widgets at a time, so a large dashboard stays responsive while it fills in.
Under the nav bar sit the tabs and the quick filters bar. Both stay in view as you scroll. Tabs always sit on one row: when there are more than fit, they narrow first, then the row scrolls sideways and keeps your current tab in view.
On a narrower window, buttons drop their labels and show icons only. Hover any icon to see what it does.
Step 2: Find the Dashboard's Settings
Click Settings to open the menu. Use the arrow keys to move through it, and Esc to close it.
Dashboard Config: the dashboard's name, description and general setup.
Access Controls: who can see and edit the dashboard.
Inspect Column Sets: which columns the inspect tables on this dashboard show.
Bulk CSV Exports, Saved Collections and AI Insights: the dashboard's data tools, shown when your account and permissions include them.
Step 3: Edit Mode, Instantly
Click Edit, or press Cmd+Shift+E (Ctrl+Shift+E on Windows). Edit mode turns on straight away, even while widgets are still refreshing. The widget picker and the filters editor get ready in the background, so they open as soon as you need them.
In edit mode the nav bar adds Multi-Select (and Format, on accounts with widget formatting), and the button reads Done Editing. Live refresh pauses while you edit, so widgets don't move under you. Click Done Editing or press the same shortcut to finish.
Step 4: The Multi-Select Bar
Click Multi-Select or press Cmd+M (Ctrl+M on Windows). If edit mode is off, the shortcut turns it on first. The multi-select bar appears under the quick filters bar. Click widgets to select them, or press Cmd+A to select every widget on the tab.
The bar holds the actions that work on many widgets at once:
Apply filters builds filters once and saves them onto many widgets. Only the filters you change are sent.
Clear filters removes the saved filters from many widgets.
Apply settings changes chart settings on many widgets at once (Step 5).
Clone, move and delete, covered in How to Bulk Edit Dashboard Widgets with Multi-Select.
Each button says what it will act on. With widgets selected, it reads, for example, Apply filters to 2 selected widgets. With nothing selected, it reads Apply filters… and asks whether you mean this tab or all tabs. Clear filters asks the same before it clears anything:
Step 5: Apply Settings to Many Widgets
Click Apply settings, then use Add a setting… to pick each setting you want to change and choose its value. The settings you can apply:
Over-time charts: Chart time unit and Chart zoom.
Trend charts: Weeks in moving average, Weeks with 0 values in the moving average, and Show previous weeks as.
Numbers: Data format.
Y-axis: Y-axis min and Y-axis max.
Heat maps: rows and columns, the day the week starts on, the cell value, and what an average divides by.
Each setting shows how many widgets take it. Then apply to the selected widgets, to this tab, or to all tabs:
Only the settings you added change. Every other setting on each widget stays as it is, and widgets that don't take a setting are left alone. The message afterwards tells you how many widgets were updated and why any were skipped.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Cmd+Shift+E: turn edit mode on or off.
Cmd+M: turn the multi-select bar on or off (turns edit mode on first).
Cmd+A: select every widget on the tab. Cmd+D: delete the selected widgets. Esc: leave multi-select.
On Windows, use Ctrl instead of Cmd. The shortcuts don't fire while you are typing in a field or have a dialog open.
Good to Know
Quick filters apply to every widget that reads them. Whatever the quick filters bar shows is what the widgets use, with two exceptions: Zendesk API metrics for Talk fetch their figure straight from Zendesk and ignore every filter, including the date range; and widget formulas compute each component from that component's own saved filters. The bar's Enabled toggle switches it off for your session (the quick filters guide). Use Revert to go back to the saved filters, or Save as default to keep your changes for everyone.
Selections are per tab. Switching tabs clears your selection. To change widgets on several tabs, leave nothing selected and choose all tabs.
Shared links and embeds show the charts only, without the nav bar.
If you have any questions, reach out to the Qvasa team. We are happy to help.