Basic navigation in UMDashboards

Open your browser and browse to https://analytics.umd.edu

UMDashboards is best viewed in the Google Chrome browser.

Click the red UMDashboards button in the header of our website to open UMDashboards.

You will be redirected to CAS. Log in & complete your Duo push to continue.

After you authenticate through CAS, you may be presented with an interstital page asking whether you want to view dashboards in HTML or Flash.

Choose Enable Flash to continue.

Choose Allow in the following prompt that appears in the top left.

You will now be logged in to UMDashboards. Depending on your settings, you will see one of two landing screens.

Depending on your settings, you will either see:

1. The Startup Dashboard you have configured in your user settings or that has been assigned to your user profile by a member of our team.

2. The default iDashboards landing screen (which is blank).

UMDashboards is set up using a system of launchers and sub-launchers.

Launchers exist at the root level of a dashboard category, as in the first picture.

Sub-launchers exist one or more below the launcher level, as in the second picture.

Dashboards (where the data lives) exist below the sub-launcher level, as in the third picture.

To get to a dashboard, you navigate using a drill-down approach from launcher to sub-launcher to dashboard.

When attempting to go back to the previous launcher, sub-launcher, or dashboard, never use your browsers back button.

Instead, click on the tabs located at the bottom of the screen to visit the previous screen you were on.

Pro tip: these tabs are similar to windows on your computer. iDashboards opens a new tab for each dashboard you visit. You can jump between any of your previous dashboards at any time.

Pro tip: most, if not all of our dashboards are interactive. We encourage you to click around and explore.

Hover your mouse over various parts of a chart to determine interactivity.

Some charts will include interactive intelligence and highlight parts of another chart when you hover, as in the first picture.

Some charts allow you to drill-down into further details about a specific data point.

Drill-down functionality is available when your cursor changes to a hand pointer when hovering over a chart.

Simply click to drill-down. The second picture shows the record to be drilled and the third picture shows the resulting chart after drill-down.

To drill back up, look for a green return arrow icon in the lower left of a chart, as in the third picture.

Many of our dashboards allow you to filter data to make it relevant to you personally.

Filters are called dashboard parameters and are usually available via dropdowns at the top of a dashboard, as in the first picture.

Many of our filters use the same logic. You will usually find a division filter, department filter, and sub-department filter.

In this example (the UMD Awards by PI dashboard), data can be filtered by Division and Tenure Home / Primary Unit of the faculty member.

In the second picture, I've filtered the data to Engineering using the Division filter and Aerospace Engineering using the Tenure Home / Primary unit filter.

Many filters allow you to select more than one value, useful to see multiple units on one dashboard.

When you find data on a dashboard you want to analyze in a different way than we have presented it, you can quickly export it into a csv file for your own analysis.

To export data, simply right-click on the chart you would like to pull the data from and select the Export Data option in the corresponding menu.

The data will download to your computer in a csv file titled after the chart name and can be used in any program that will read csv files, including Microsoft Excel.