This Thursday, Mark Miller and I will be delivering our second “Easy Tabs interface” online workshop. One of the examples we’ll review is the use of tabs in dashboards.

In our online workshops, each participant receives his/her own sandbox. Access to the sandboxes is restricted, so to give you a taste of the demos I have created a mockup of the project dashboard:
http://www.pathtosharepoint.com/Calendars/Pages/ProjectDashboard.htm

Note that the original page is built on a standard wss site, using only the SharePoint UI (no SharePoint Designer, no server access).

There are multiple approaches to dashboards, depending on the story to tell and the audience. I am not claiming that tabs are a best practice, I am just suggesting them as one more option in our toolkit.

Tabs allow you to create layers. In my example, the first layer is dedicated to visual indicators, allowing you to assess at a glance the health of the project. At the same time, thanks to the tabs, additional information is not far behind, and can be reached without the need to leave the dashboard or even refresh the page. Under each tab, you can find more details, for example data or analyses supporting the charts. Or on the contrary you can filter information, allowing to focus on specific items (e.g. My Tasks, My Issues).

Interested in the Easy Tabs? Then register for our online workshop this Thursday. See you there!

Credit goes to Craig Lowrie for the color coded Gantt, and Claudio Cabaleyro for the pie chart. An HTML calculated column was used to create the bar chart.