Placker’s New Reports are an effective tool for generating Graphs and KPIs that can be accessed by your team in real time.

You can create a report to make explicit the overdue tasks, number of hours assigned to each team member, overall budget and other relevant indicators.

In this article, you will see some practical examples of ways to keep your projects transparent and up-to-date.

We will talk about:

Click on the embedded video below to watch our webinar and discover how you can take advantage of it:

When there are many tasks to keep track of, having an overview is a great way to get insight and improve your team’s productivity.

To do this, open a board in Placker, then click “Add view” and “Report (empty)” for a blank report or “Report (showcase)” for a pre-built report with sample widgets.

This will create a new tab in your board with an empty area. To enter the editing mode, click “Edit report”.

The following sections will explain how each area of the reports work and how to set up your customized report.

Template views allow you to create, save, and reuse layouts for your pages. This will save you time and ensure consistency across your pages.

When you click Add view / Explore more views, there will be a variety of categories and options to choose from. For example, there are reports related to Agile that help you check the sprint status and check the total story points estimated.

Our team created these templates based on successful cases of users that are benefiting from customized Placker views to achieve better organization and visibility levels on their projects.

If you need a different kind of template or want to share your own practices, please send us a message.

A great way to see how many cards are on a board is to add a widget.

For example, you can click “Add widget”, which by default includes a Single value widget, showing how many cards are in a board.

There will be a panel at the right with many settings. In this example, instead of seeing how many cards there are on the board, we clicked “Add filter” to make visible only the number of cards.

Another option of widget is the Bar chart, where cards can be displayed by category. The example below shows the attribute member.

This can tell a project manager how many tasks each member has assigned to. It also makes it explicit if there are cards with no members assigned if “Show unassigned” is set to “Yes”.

Advanced tip: you can see another unit of measure by changing the "Attribute" field to see the effort in a list, instead of the number of cards, for example.

The bar chart distributes cards in one category at the time, the one selected as an attribute. To see two or more of them, you can either create two bar charts side by side, or add a “Pivot table” widget, which crosses these attributes.

The example below shows how many cards are assigned to each member, but also how many cards are in each status. It can be a clear way of understanding if a member has many cards started but not finished, possibly needing help to get things done:

The “Empty” widget is used to add space between two widgets, as illustrated in the images below - the second shows what the section looks like after saving the changes.

The card table widget contains a customizable table that has basically a list of cards, but you can include more attributes for a broader view on the work to be done.

And the last widget type that we will talk about is the Text area widget, which allows you to add free text. An idea on using this is to write about what will be added to the report, making it readable by everyone who accesses the dashboard.

To add bold, italic, headers, you can use Markdown, a markup language for documents.

Seeing overall numbers of the boards may be enough to make decisions, but if you need more details, you can click one of the widgets after saving the changes or click “Data”, at the top left corner.

This will show the card information that was used to generate each widget that is displayed on the report area.

The example below shows that there is a widget showing how many cards are in each list. To see exactly what these cards are, this can be visualized in the card table below the widget, as demonstrated in the example screenshot below.

You can also click one of the card titles to open the card overview and change attributes if needed.

This can be useful when you are using the data table during a meeting and decide to reschedule the date of a card by not having to close the report and open the board view.

Looking at the indicators after creating a report brings a lot of insight, but the most effective way to work with reports is to check it with a frequent cadence and analyze the numbers.

A possible solution to make sure that your team remembers to look at the reports is to click “Export” and set an automation, so that you receive an email with the link and PDF of the reports.

This is also a great way to make sure that all the stakeholders that need to be kept informed on the progress of this project.

If you don’t wish to set an automation, an alternative is to simply copy the URL of the report view and send it to whoever wishes to access the report. They will need an active Placker account to be able to see it.

The instructions above can give you understanding of the essential elements of the new reports, and these are some more things that can make your analysis even more effective:

Your feedback is very important to us and we want to make sure that the new reports can address the needs of as many users as possible.

Please send a message to us using the chat button sharing your thoughts on the report view. Our team will be happy to hear what you have to say and improve the reports based on that.

To try out the new reports, access your Placker account and open one of your boards.