Add and style text on a Dashboard

Workspace Administrators can add text boxes to any dashboard to improve the end-user’s understanding of the data displayed, or to provide instructions about how to complete tasks.

You can add as many text boxes as you need to make your dashboards easier to use, but it’s good practice to use text boxes sparingly to make sure you don't overload users with information.

Styling can be applied to differentiate between headings, instructions, and normal text.

End users can view text boxes on a dashboard, but only Workspace Administrators have permission to add, edit, and delete text boxes.

For security purposes, Anaplan strips out anything placed between greater than (<) and less than (>) characters (<>) with no spaces. If you need to use less than and greater than characters in static text boxes, you can prevent the text from being stripped out by adding a space after the less than character.

For example, if you type <B> into a static text box, Anaplan sees this as a possible security issue and strips it out. If you type < B> your text will remain intact when processed.

You can add text boxes to a dashboard from the Dashboard Designer toolbar. New text boxes are positioned at the top of the dashboard, have 100% width, and text wrapping is applied automatically. The new text box will have focus, with a solid blue outline and a blue Move button. Once you've added a text box, you can edit the content as often as you need to.

In the Dashboard Designer, select the Add Text button on the dashboard toolbar. A text box with a blue move handle is added to the top of the canvas with the instruction to Enter text here… Double-click in the text box to type (or paste in) the text you want to display. Select the Save or Save & Exit button on the dashboard toolbar to save your changes.

You can paste content from web pages into a text box but, depending on your browser and the type of content, you may lose formatting or images.

In the Dashboard Designer, select the text box. Its border will turn blue and a blue Move handle will appear at the top center. Grab the move handle to drag the text box to the required location. Green indicators will display to help you place the text box. Select the Save or Save & Exit button on the dashboard toolbar to save your changes.

In the Dashboard Designer, select the text box. Its border will turn blue and an arrowhead will display in the bottom right corner. Drag the arrowhead in or out to resize the text box. The measurements for text boxes aren't displayed in the Dashboard Designer Properties panel. Select the Save or Save & Exit button on the dashboard toolbar to save your changes.

You can’t resize a text box as you edit text. The resize arrowhead isn't shown.

When manually resizing a text box, you can select the resize arrowhead to reduce the size of the text box incrementally.

To create text boxes of equal size that are lined up beside each other, create the required number of text boxes, and drag them alongside each other. As you do this, the text boxes will resize and align automatically. This provides a good basis for aligning grids or charts underneath the text boxes.

We recommend that text boxes aren't horizontally aligned with elements such as grids and charts. The results will always be more reliable if text boxes occupy space above grids, and charts and are lined up with each other, particularly if the dashboard is to be exported to PDF format.

Elements, such as text boxes, automatically adjust to accommodate other elements around them. If you place a text box between two existing elements, the three will automatically resize to fill 100% of the screen. If you resize the screen, the elements will resize accordingly. This behavior applies to up to three text box elements. If you need a greater number of text box elements, they must be sized manually to fit across the screen.

Once you manually resize a text box or element, it loses the ability to resize automatically and will maintain any measurements set by you. If you were to resize text box A and place it between two text boxes that had not been amended (text boxes B and C), B and C would resize to accommodate text box A but A would not resize at all.

Resizing text boxes can impact whether you see scroll bars on your dashboard. For example, if you add two text boxes to an empty dashboard and place them side-by-side, they automatically adjust to occupy 100% of the screen (50% each). If you manually adjust the size of those text boxes, make sure that their combined size doesn’t exceed 100%. This is something you need to be particularly aware of if you’re specifying the size in pixels. If the size does exceed 100%, scroll bars will appear at the bottom of the dashboard to enable you to reach the edge of the element that's beyond 100%.

If you use blank text boxes as a mechanism for creating space on a dashboard, when you export the dashboard to PDF, the output may not be rendered precisely. The Export to PDF function expects to find text in a text box. If there is no text, the function can't accurately calculate the layout of the page. We recommend using the auto-sizing features of dashboard elements to provide the best output to PDF format.

To differentiate content, you can apply predefined styles to text, for example, headings, instructions, and normal text.

To improve the way text reads, press Control + Alt + Enter, or Alt + Enter, to insert a line feed character to move text to a new line. This key combination is supported in all browsers on both Windows and Mac.

Line feeds must be added between text blocks, to separate paragraphs or headings. There must be some text on either side of the line feed. If you add line feeds to the beginning of a text box to move a heading down, they'll disappear when you exit edit text mode because there is no text preceding them. The same happens if you add a series of line feeds after a block of text, as there is no text following them so they'll disappear.

Text, formatted with line feed characters, will retain this format when you copy and paste between text cells in Anaplan, and between Anaplan and Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, or Word.

To edit the content of a text box, double click in the text box and select, or enter, the text you want to format. From Style Options, in the Properties panel, select the styling you want to apply from the Change style list. Choose a save option from the dashboard toolbar to save your changes.

Select the text box. Its border will turn blue and a red cross will display in the top right-hand corner. Select the red cross. A message is displayed asking you to confirm the delete action. To delete, select OK or to keep the text box, select Cancel.