Use panels to organize your Analysis Workspace projects

Hey everybody, it’s Doug. In this video I want to show you how to use panels in Analysis Workspace to organize your projects, do comparisons in your projects and even affect project performance. So let’s kind of dive in here. First of all, when you create a new project, you’re going to be presented with a free form panel as you can see here. Just to kind of back up, you know, panels are the most basic of building blocks in a project.

And you can see over here on the left panels. And then we have visualizations which go into panels and components which go into visualizations.

So as you can see here we have one panel with blue line around it and then we can put any number of visualizations into this panel. This first one here has a freeform table, and that’s kind of what we get when we get a brand new project. And if you want to add additional panels, you can do that by dragging and dropping them from the panels section over here, you know, any of these kinds of panels and drop them in. You can also even just hit this plus here to add a blank panel.

When you add a blank panel here, then as you can see, this will automatically drop down to the components over here. And you can see that in this panel you’ll have some of the most popular visualizations like freeform table or cohort tables, maps, et cetera.

And you even have a quick link to a couple of panels, kind of to turn this one into an attribution panel or turn this into a quick insights panel or even turn this into a segment comparison panel.

So you can see this icon here, which is the panel icon, and that’s what kind of gives you the idea here that this is actually changing this blank panel into one of those panels. Or you can again click on one of these visualizations to quickly add, you know, a fallout visualization or a Venn diagram or whatever. Now, at the time of this recording if I go back up to the panels, you can see we have a number of panels, blank attribution, freeform, next or previous item. All of these panels here, I guess with the exception of the blank panel, give you a panel that is kind of preloaded with stuff to give you a head start.

Some of them more than others, obviously. A freeform table, very basic, just puts that in. You can drag stuff into it. But something like a segment comparison panel will give you more visualizations in that panel.

I’m not going to go into all of them in here because there are additional videos that go into each one and you can always look in the documentation as well. In fact, even at the time of this recording there are a few other panels that are available to you that are not showing up right now including a few media-based panels because I just don’t happen to have media enabled for this report suite.

And an A for T panel, or an analytics for target panel, 'cause I don’t have that enabled for this report suite either. So those would show up here as well. Now, why would you want more than one panel, more than one canvas like this? Couple of big reasons. First of all, you can see at the top of each panel there is a date, a time period associated with the panel.

So all of the visualizations that go into each panel will by default take this date period.

So that’s one way that you can organize your project is by time periods. So maybe have some panels that are, you know, as you can see this month, have some panels that are previous time periods, et cetera.

Another big difference in panels is right here, it is the report suite. So you can see that I have this report suite on both of them, but a panel has its own report suite. So I can switch this to any report suite, and I’ll just change this to Alloy Doug. So now all of the visualizations in this panel would be pulling data from that report suite. So you can see that this is another way to manage or organize or even compare data in your project.

Different report suites might be associated with different business units, so you could organize that way.

They might be associated with different geography, so you could organize things that way, et cetera. In any case, you can organize things by report suite, by date, et cetera.

Now the reason why I also said compare is because if you put the same visualizations into these two panels but they were referencing two different report suites, then you could actually compare them side by side and you can actually literally put them side by side.

If you did something like this and you moved them over and now they can be side by side and if you had the same visualizations in these, you’d be able to compare the data for one report suite versus another report suite. So anyway, another good way to use panels.

And as I mentioned, you can even affect project performance because you can for one thing collapse the panels. So let me add a couple of panels here and so now I’ve got you know, four panels. And you can collapse them one at a time like this or you can even just right click on one of them and say collapse all panels.

And so one way that you can actually affect project performance is maybe to just have one or two panels expanded, so it doesn’t have to actually fill all of the data in the whole project at the same time, right? If we just have, for example, these top two ones right here which are the ones that I need to look at the most and I have these two down here that are collapsed, then I can right away get this data loaded up here. And this data in these third and fourth panels down here, that data doesn’t have to load right away. So you can jump right into analysis in these top panels.

Anyway, just a few tips there on being able to use panels in your project. Hope that was helpful and have a great day. -