Within the reporting section of the platform, you will find dashboards, which allow you to create your own tailored view of visualisations and custom charts. These can be totally personalised to shape the way you view the data within the platform or you can even schedule for your dashboard to send to out via email on a regular cadence as a pdf report. Neat! These will quickly become the answer to your team’s productivity and their regular reporting needs.

In this article, we will go through the steps of how to get started creating your very own custom charts...

Firstly, head to the Reports tab, click on Create Dashboards, and then click Start Now to create an insights report from scratch (this will give you a blank template to get started with. Alternatively, you can select one of our dashboard templates as a starting point). If you have an existing dashboard already set up, you can also create a custom chart within that report.

You then want to click the Add Chart button, and then select the Custom Charts option.

Here is where you have the option to create a chart from scratch, use a template or copy and paste over a custom chart you may have set up on another dashboard or within another search.

In the below example, let's create a pie chart which looks at data source share of voice.

Select the chart type from the options in the top right hand corner.

Below the chart, you will find the first segment to the pie chart. You can add as many segments as you want, and they will show up with different colours to help distinguish them from one another. You can click to change these colours if you like too!

Name each segment with each social data source that has been added in the search. Then you will need to define what you want each segment to represent with a filter. Click on the blue filter button to uncover the filtering options. For this channel share of voice example, under Target, select Facebook as the data source. Click Apply Filter and it will adjust the Facebook segment in the pie chart to represent content from Facebook only.

Rinse and repeat for each segment of your custom chart. Once you have completed this, you'll be taken to the Summary stage, where you can give the chart a title, description and can change the size of the chart (half size or full report width).

Click save and the chart will appear in your dashboard!

Let's add another custom chart looking at customer service related topics by sentiment. We want to understand which customer service topics are most positively talked about and which ones are most negative. To do this we are going to create two custom charts and put them side by side. Click on Add Chart, select Custom Chart and then Create from Scratch.

We are selecting a Spline graph (volume of conversation over time) for our example and adding a segment to represent each customer service topic. We have also colour coded each segment to be a different shade of red to reflect negative sentiment.

Then, as before, click on the blue filter button for each segment and define your filter. For this example we are applying two elements to each segment. Firstly the keywords which reflect the customer service topic and then secondly the negative sentiment filter. Click Apply Filter and repeat for each segment.

Your custom chart will update to reflect your filters and should now start to look something like this:

Click on the next step and give the chart a title and a brief description. Click Save and just like that, it will be added to your dashboard.

Now, we need to create the positive sentiment chart. But here's a trick to save you some time...

Click to Add Chart, select Custom Charts, this time select Import from this search and find/search for the chart you just named and created. Select it and you've got a template to work from. In this case, all we need to do is change the negative element of the filters to positive and change the colours of the segments! Once completed, save your custom chart. Then you should have something like this showing in your dashboard:

It's not a Custom Dashboard if you can't add some sort of branding to it, right? Well the good news is that not only can you customise the content of your dashboard, but also its look and feel. To edit your dashboard, click on the pencil icon in the top right corner to open up the Dashboard Settings.

You can upload a logo and a header image which will display in the platform on your dashboard and also if you chose to export or schedule your dashboard as a regular report.

We understand that different teams will have different users accessing the same searches. So we've made it possible to create Private Dashboards, which only the creator can edit and manage access for, or Public Dashboards, which anyone in your team can access.

When a dashboard is made private, the creator can assign roles and permissions to specific users, allowing them to retain control on who can view and manage that dashboard. This makes collaborating and sharing insights with other users flexible.

Now that you've got your dashboard all set up and you'd like to share it via email, what next? You have 2 options:

You can choose to email the report immediately to a list of recipients:

Or you can choose to schedule a recurring email to send on a regular cadence to suit your reporting needs.

If you want something more advanced, such as being able to email the report at a specific date and time of day, then use the Advanced scheduling settings.

Last but not least, you can preview your dashboard in your web browser and share the URL preview link with anyone in your team who has access to that dashboard on Pulsar. You can also download a PDF file of the entire dashboard which you can choose to share with anyone.

To do this click on the Preview & Export button found in the top right corner of your dashboard.

Once you have clicked through to the preview you will find the Export button. Click on that and it will export your dashboard as a PDF report.