Using Boards to Get Maximum Visibility of Your Data

Never underestimate your brain’s power; research from MIT has shown that the human brain can process an image in just 13 milliseconds! 🧠 We feel this power everyday when we watch the TV, read a magazine or scroll through reams of memes on social media. 

But how do we harness this ability and translate it into business value? Finding the right tools to visualise your data is a good start.  

Gridfox is a no-code tool that gives you the freedom to create powerful applications, equipped with features that enable you to securely manage and visualise your critical data. 

Boards, or Kanban Boards, are the backbone of this setup; they help you visualise multiple tasks simultaneously, reduce silos and enhance efficiency. 

Small and medium-sized businesses, in particular, gain a competitive edge by making data visually accessible and ensuring that they have the maximum oversight required to keep up with today’s ever-changing industry landscape. 

This article shows you how, with Gridfox’s Boards feature, businesses can quickly get an overview of their data in order to make informed decisions. 

Building your Boards

So that you can get the most from your Boards, we recommend getting familiar with creating tables and adding fields first; this will allow you to organise all your necessary data before collating it into your Board. 

From here the Board building process is easy and accessible:  

1. Navigate to the Board item in the the create tab, 
2. Click and give your new Board a title 
3. Here you’ll be prompted to select a table and field where data will be pulled from 
4. Further fields can be added from your ‘available fields’ list. Simply drag to add and reorder

With your Board now ready to publish, you can also configure additional settings that include adding search fields, navigating rows by field and setting card colours. This ability to customise your Boards makes them a highly useful feature that can be tailored to the way your team works. 🎨

Click Save and your new Board will be good-to-go! 

How you store data is, again, highly unique to you and your team. Records can be displayed as cards that can be divided into columns in Boards. The columns may then be further divided into rows.

Grouping items into rows and columns allows you to follow their progress through various stages and get a clear view of where your project is at. 

It’s also easy to change the configuration of your Boards. If you want to change one, or more than one, of the columns on your Board, you can do this by simply clicking on the column name and making your changes.

Use Across the Board 

Because of their highly customisable nature, Boards have many use cases across industries and projects. You can harness this versatility by adapting and scaling your Boards over time.🔧 

For one, Boards enable project managers to manage their team’s workloads. The user-friendly column display ensures that managers can see the progress of all their team members, identify any workload imbalances and avoid time-consuming progress update meetings. Having visibility of your colleagues’ workload and task list is beneficial regardless of your industry or the size of your team. 

Considering Boards give you an overall view of a collection of records, they are also a great tool for visualising your sales pipeline.

A quick view of all opportunities stored on the Board will allow the sales team to see who is working on what and the status of each opportunity. The cards can be moved around the Board to ensure continuous visibility of all deal statuses.  

This at-a-glance visibility makes Boards well-suited for other timeline-based projects. Want to track a contact from reach to acquisition and onwards? Check out Gridfox’s Sales CRM template, complete with a Board Screen. Need to keep on top of new starters joining your company? Use the New Starters template, which features a Board Screen to navigate the who’s who of your new colleagues. 

As with all Gridfox features, Boards become even more powerful when linked with other features. Take workflows as one example; teams can be notified of any status updates that are visualised on their Board with workflows providing real-time notifications. 

Do Better With Boards

However you use Boards, we’re confident that your teams will benefit from Gridfox’s no-code nature; with no training you’ll be able to build a powerful application in minutes.⏰ 

As your business grows and develops over time, making adjustments to the setup of your Gridfox projects becomes another necessary step. Here we’ve shown how Gridfox’s Board feature empowers teams to innovate their projects with visually accessible views. 

With the right tools to facilitate data visibility, teams can focus on project progress and maintain collaboration over time.