December 2nd: Object templates

Notice: Video link in the bottom of article

In TARGIT, there are many types of templates and features similar to templates to help you create and maintain a certain design for your dashboards and reports:

• Dashboard templates (including templates for mobile devices)
• Report templates
• Textbox templates (useable as textboxes and as buttons in menu objects)
• Crosstab themes 
• Reusable menus

This will help you a good part of the way, but what is not available is templates for graphical objects like charts and maps.

When you design a chart or map, you have a lot of different options that you can choose from. In a well-designed TARGIT portal, these choices should be as standardized as possible across all dashboards and templates.

Let me line up some of the choices you have to make:

• Do we use object titles?  
• What about labels and mouse-over information?
• Do we have rules for scales on the measure axis of the column-, line- and barcharts?
• Do we even show the scale if there are few values with labels?
• And what about font and font sizes for all parts of the chart/map?
• What about colors? Drill colors? 

When you get into the details, there are even more small choices - these should be part of a design guide that everyone can access.

An example of a design guide could look like can be found here: https://solutions.targit.com/default.aspx?doc=vfs://Global/Webinars/Portal%20Design/Design%20Guide.xview 

But even with the design guide, you start from scratch every time you create a chart/map, and you will have to remember all this and do a lot of clicking to make sure that you're aligned with the setup of the rest of your TARGIT portal and your design guide.

Instead, make a collection of graph types that are formatted the right way according to your design guide, and then copy/paste from these every time you make a graph.

Here's an example of a simple version of such a collection:
https://solutions.targit.com/default.aspx?doc=vfs://Global/Webinars/Portal%20Design/Graph%20samples.xview 

Extra tip: This could also be a way to limit the number of different visualizations to the ones that the design guide allows.