Menu, Dashboard and Dashlets

This chapter gives an overview of CiviCRM's dashboard (its 'home page') and the navigation menu available for people working in CiviCRM.

The navigation menu

The navigation menu is a small bar at the top of every "back office" page of CiviCRM. It is organized into a series of navigation areas, each representing a major area of functionality in CiviCRM in addition to search and adminstration areas. The menu items include:

Quick Search - Easily lookup a name, email or other custom fields

Menu Search and Logout - Search the entire CiviCRM menu and logout

Search - Search your CRM data

Contacts – Find, add, and manage contacts

Contributions – Search contributions and manage contribution pages

Events – Create and manage event registrations

Mailings – Send bulk emails and view mailing history

Reports – Generate and access reports

Administer – Configure system settings and custom data

Quickly finding menu items

To help you find your way around quickly—the searchable navigation menu is accessible by hovering over the CiviCRM icon in the top navigation next to the quick search bar.

When you hover your mouse over the CiviCRM logo in the top bar, a small panel appears with a search field and a list of available menu items.

You can:

1. Click into the search field
2. Type part of a menu item name—for example, start typing “display preferences” or “groups”.
3. The list filters down to show only matching menu items.
4. Click the item you want to jump directly to that page.
5. Now you don't need to remember the menu structure, just search it!

Modifying the menu

You can modify the navigation menu by going to: Administer > Customize > Navigation Menu and then adding, disabling or rearranging menu items on the screen.

Note

Remember that changes you make to the navigation menu will be seen by everyone who has the appropriate permissions to see the menu, for better or for worse, so be careful when modifying the navigation menu.

To the far-left of the navigation menu is the [Quick Search] (https://docs.civicrm.org/user/en/latest/the-user-interface/searching/#quick-search) field. See the Searching chapter for more details.

The home dashboard & dashlets

When you first log into CiviCRM, the first page that you will see is the dashboard (CiviCRM Home). The dashboard allows you to see important information about your site and CiviCRM by displaying a series of "dashlets". A dashlet is a report that you can display on your home dashboard. Many dashlets come with CiviCRM by default, and you or your administrator can create additional dashlets that are specific to your organization's needs. Some examples of dashlets that come with CiviCRM include:

• Donor Report: a bar graph of the amount of total contributions.
• Activities: a list of recent activities that have been recorded by CiviCRM (this could include emails sent to constituents, donations that have been made, or meetings that have been scheduled in CiviCRM).
• Membership Report: a table summarising information about Members tracked by CiviCRM and broken out by month. This includes the number of Members of each type, total amounts of payments made and the number of contributions made, among other things.

You can add these dashlets to your CiviCRM dashboard by clicking the Configure Your Dashboard button. You will see a list of dashlets that can be dragged into the right or left column of your dashboard.

Click Done to save the dashlets to your dashboard. From now on, you will see updates to the status of your dashlets every time you log in (if you'd like to check and see any changes that have occurred more recently, you can always click Refresh Dashboard Data - this will reload each dashlet and pull in any new information). For performance reasons, dashlets are cached. You can change how often a dashlet refreshes by editing its report. For example for the Contribution Summary report go to Reports > Contribution Reports and click on Contribution Summary. Under the tab Access you will find the Cache dashlet for option. If that option is not available, first select the box that says Available for Dashboard?. To save click on Actions > Save.

Any CiviReport can be made available as a dashlet.

To create a dashlet:

• Click Reports > My Reports and subsequently on the button New Report.
• Select the report template that you want to use.
• While here, configure the report via the tabs Columns, Sorting, and Filters. For example, you may want the report to always show data for "This Quarter" or "This Year". That is what the filter "Date Received" is for.
• Click View results.
• Choose between Tabular, Bar Chart, or Pie Chart via the dropdown box to the right of the Actions dropdown.
• At the bottom of the Access tab, select the box that says Available for Dashboard?. Users with permissions to see that information will be able to add that dashlet. (See the section on permissions for more information).
• Click Actions > Create Report.

Now add the dashlet to your dashboard:

• Click in the menu on the CiviCRM logo and then on CiviCRM Home to get to your dashboard.
• Click Configure Dashboard. Drag the dashlet from the "Available Dashlets" box to the column where you'd like it to appear.
• Click Done.

(Refer to the section on Reporting for more details on working with reports.)

Note

You can now use Search Kit with FormBuilder to add dashlets. Please refer to Form Builder for details.