Badge of the Month: September

Miran Saric · 2024-09-03T15:03:12+00:00

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Summer is in the rearview mirror and with that comes the push to end the second half of the year strong!

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Thanks to our many August badge earners for their contributions, @Nico Weber, @Crystal Zhao, @Rishabh Shahi, @Zayaan Wasif, @Mindy Waltz, and @Miran Saric. As always, the Community is better because of your contributions,

We'll be announcing our next round of Community Captains soon—stay tuned! If you're interested in joining the ranks of our Captains, please comment 'I'm interested' below, and we'll follow up with you directly. Participating in the Badge of the Month program is a great way to achieve your annual give-back for the Captain program!

It's not too late to participate. Check out these previous Badge of the Month opportunities:

August Badge of the Month
July Badge of the Month
June Badge of the Month

September question of the month

What is one thing you learned recently about using Board that others might find useful?

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It could be something big and transformative, or it could be a minor feature that improved your day-to-day Board experience. Share your tips with the rest of Community in the comments below and get yourself a brand new September badge!

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Comments

Crystal Zhao

One thing that I learned a while back that I really liked was that you can use basic HTML tags inside of the "Show Message" step of a procedure. That means that you can increase the font with H1 or H2, make words bold or underline, etc.

Miran Saric

That's great, thanks for sharing, @Crystal Zhao!

Rishabh Shahi

Most recently, I got myself acquainted with the 'Drill-through' feature. It's a powerful component which is massively underrated & overlooked.

Basically, it's an easier way to review your numbers at a lower level without even loading that dataset into your Board's memory/DM. Once you've established the connection with your origin SQL server, you have the ability to set your Select based queries & statements and Voila! you're good to dig deeper into the raw data without configuring a single data reader or smart import to populate them into your cubes.

The best benefit it represents is a sizeable saving on the amount of server's resources required & an efficient performance of your Board application overall. Apart from that, it's also a faster way for all the end users to take a deeper dive without the need to choose between all the entities to drill down to ;)

For more information, visit this page - https://help.board.com/docs/about-drill-throughs

Thank you

Miran Saric

Thanks so much for sharing, @Rishabh Shahi!

Nico Weber

In Board 14.1, one very useful feature is the ability to send notifications via Microsoft Teams using its API functionality. This feature allows users to automate alerts and updates to relevant stakeholders directly through Teams channels, ensuring that everyone is informed in real time without leaving the Board environment.

With Board 14.1’s integration capabilities, you can set up triggers or conditions in your data workflows (such as threshold breaches, status updates, or report completions) that automatically generate a message and send it to a Teams channel. This is done through Board's REST API that communicates with the Microsoft Teams API. For example, when certain KPIs are reached or a new report is published, a notification can be sent instantly to the intended team, eliminating the need for manual alerts.

This functionality is particularly valuable for fostering collaboration and improving responsiveness since it streamlines communication directly into the tools teams are already using.

Miran Saric

Incredibly useful, thank you for sharing that @Nico Weber!

Shisong

There's a lovely function called "Screen fit". With it, I can open two browser tabs to have a side-by-side view. This is especially useful when you want to track the pre-and-post of data entry.

Carlos Eduardo Meneses Maran

Recently, I have learned the correct range of values with which the layout dynamicity algorithms work:

Visibility distinguishes between two cases: equal to zero or non-zero.
Transparency uses values between zero and one hundred.
Enabled distinguishes between two cases: zero or non-zero.

Therefore, it is a mistake to try to make transparency work with an algorithm of values between zero and one.

These options are interesting for creating dynamic visualisations in Board.

Miran Saric

Super helpful! Thanks @Shisong and @Carlos Eduardo Meneses Maran!

Holly Rieke

I'm loving all these key learnings from everyone! Keep 'em coming!

Lucas Charello

I learned recently that many Excel formulas to manipulate strings will work on Board Dataflows, even if they are not referenced on Board Documentation. We can even use wild card characters in some of them, which is very useful. Generally you have to shift ";" from Excel formula to "," in order to make it work on Board.

Examples that I used today:

Len(a): "a" is a cube with data in text format. As on Excel, this function returns the number of characters of the cell.
Search("ello*",a): "a" is again a text data cube. This function returns the position of the first character you looked for. The * is the wild card for any text coming after.
Those are referenced ⇒ Left and Right(a,1): Very known function to show a number of characters. Also work if 1 is a cube with a value.

Known referenced algorithms can be found here.

Miran Saric

Thanks for the insight, @Lucas Charello!

Walter

One board feature I learned recently is the Dynamic select on entities base on a given selector (filter). As a developer I think this is a pretty cool feature because it gives me the flexibility to filter a field in my report without impacting others.

Miran Saric

Appreciate you sharing, @Walter!

Nicolas CHIGROS

Not a recent learning but you can actually use more than one "." to reference previous cubes blocks in a rule like =[..C01]

https://help.board.com/docs/creating-a-rule

Miran Saric

Very neat, @Nicolas CHIGROS! Thanks!

Omar

What I recently learned about using Board is the power of API integration to bring data from external tools into Board. Even more impressive is the ability to transfer data between different data models, even across different platforms, using Board's full API. This allows to seamlessly connect and transfer data from one platform’s data model to another, making it much easier to integrate and work with data from various sources. This capability significantly enables smooth data exchanges between platforms and sources without manual intervention.

Holly Rieke

@Omar Thanks for highlighting your learnings! It helps everyone learn together :)

Mélodie Vignes Souksone

thanks @Lucas Charello for the insights

I learnt recently too that the formula Excel MAX can be used in the Dataflow and was looking for the whole list of functions !