Customizing the FitnessSyncer Dashboard

Building your own dashboard is a FitnessSyncer Pro feature, and you do it on the website rather than in the apps. This page covers everything you can change: how to get into edit mode and arrange a report, the report’s own settings, and every chart, pivot table, indicator and element you can put on one.

For what the dashboard shows you before you change anything, including the ready-made reports, see FitnessSyncer Dashboard.

Dashboard Customization

To customize the FitnessSyncer Dashboard, click the Gear .

When you enter into Edit Mode, you will see a panel at the top of the screen with the current report properties. All of the charts associated with the report (even those without data) will be shown and have a gear menu associated with them.

From the dialog at the top of the screen, you can:

• Change the report name by editing the Report Name
• Create a copy of the report by selecting “Save As” — Note that you cannot save when a Dashboard is still loading.
• Delete the report by selecting “Delete”
• Undo all changes to the report by selecting “Reset”
• Exit edit mode “Cancel”
• Adding new charts to a dashboard by selecting the “New Chart” button.
• Change Report Properties such as colors by using the “Properties” button.

To create a new, blank report, you would do so from the Report Load menu and selecting the icon.

On each of the charts, you can:

• Reorder the charts by simply clicking and dragging charts to the location you wish.
• Change the properties of a chart by the Gear near a chart and selecting the Properties option.
• Clone charts by clicking the Gear near a chart and selecting the Clone Chart to clone the report inline or Clone to Dashboard to clone it to another report.
• Remove charts by clicking the Gear near a chart and selecting the Remove option.
• Change the width of certain charts by clicking the Gear near a chart and selecting the Toggle Width option.
• Download the backing data of most charts by clicking the Gear near a chart and selecting the Download CSV option.

The chart editor fills the screen, with the chart you are working on beside the options rather than behind them. The options are grouped into sections you can open and close, and the box at the top of the list searches all of them at once, so you can type part of a setting’s name instead of hunting through the groups for it.

Changing any option leaves the chart as it was and offers you a Preview button over it, because redrawing means fetching your data again. Press Preview to see the change, or Apply to keep it and close the editor.

While the editor is open, any controls belonging to the chart itself, such as the Trend Comparison chart’s own metric picker, are dimmed and do nothing. They redraw the chart from its saved settings rather than the ones you are editing, so they would undo your changes. Change the chart from the options list instead.

Report Settings

You can change the properties by clicking the Properties button from the report edit mode at the top of the screen.

You can change the colors used in most charts on the Color tab.

You can change the report’s default Graph By setting and scope on the Settings tab.

Chart Configuration

Most of the power in the FitnessSyncer Dashboard for Pro users comes in the ability to add your own charts to the dashboard and to edit the current charts to meet your needs. This section discusses the various options available.

There are 4 chart categories which will be discussed below:

• Charts: this includes all chart visualizations ranging from Area, Line, Pie, and more.
• Key Performance Indicators: this includes key performance indicator summaries either in textual or visual form.
• Collections: these are pre-packaged FitnessSyncer options, such as Goal KPI Set, ShoeRenew Lifetime Reports, Personal Detail Tables, and Allergy, Condition, and Medication reports.
• UI Items: these are pre-packed FitnessSyncer UI elements, such as Report Navigation, Source Filters, and Title sections.

Charts

Charts are graphical visualizations of your data.

FitnessSyncer has two types of charts, one of which can only accept one data element per chart. These charts include:

• Pie Chart
• Donut Chart: Like a Pie chart, but with a hole in the middle
• Heat Map Chart: Shows the popularity of data distribution based on a Heat Map configuration.
• Table Charts: Data shown as a table

The other type of chart allows you to have multiple data items shown. These charts include:

• Area Chart: Chart which the region from 0 to the current item is filled in.
• Area Range Chart: Chart shows the average value as a line and the range of the data as an area around the average.
• Bar Chart: Shows the data in bars
• Box Plot Chart displays the range of your data, great for data like Glucose or Heart Rate, where:
  • the bottom whisker (line) is the lowest value
  • the top whisker (line) is the maximum value
  • the box depicts the range of the 25th to 75th percentile
  • the line in the box shows the 50th percentile (median)
• Column Chart: Shows the data in columns
• Histogram Chart: Shows data frequency, such as how many of your runs are 3 miles, 5 miles, etc.
• Item Duration by Day: Similar to the Daily Analyzer, shows your activities and sleep per day by hour and duration.
• Line Chart: Chart with just a line
• Scatter Chart: Scatter Plot shows the relationship between your data based on a Labeler for grouping.
• Spider Chart: Based on categories, spreads data on a spider web.
• Stacked Bar Chart: Bar chart where instead of the categories being side-by-side, they are stacked.
• Stacked Column Chart: Column chart where instead of the categories being side-by-side, they are stacked.
• Variable Pie Chart: Pie chart along two dimensions.

Two options in the chart’s General settings change how a chart reads rather than what it measures:

• Color by goal: on an Area, Line, Column or Bar chart, each point is colored by whether that period met the goal for the field, instead of by the report’s palette. The direction comes from the goal itself, so a step count you want above 10,000 and a calorie count you want below 2,200 both read green when you are on the right side of the line. A period that only just missed is shaded differently from one that missed badly, and what counts as “only just” is worked out from how much that metric normally moves rather than from a percentage you have to pick.
• Hide unless every field has data: on a chart comparing two or more fields, hide the chart entirely when one of them has nothing to show in the period on screen. Without this, a comparison like Glucose against Carbohydrates still draws when you have logged no food, which looks like a finding rather than a gap.

FitnessSyncer Pro users also have Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts, described below, which let you rearrange how your data is broken down without rebuilding the chart.

Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts

Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts are available to FitnessSyncer Pro users, and they are the fastest and easiest way to explore your data. Rather than deciding up front what a chart should show, you pick what to measure and then rearrange how it is broken down until the answer you are looking for appears.

If you have used a spreadsheet’s pivot tables, these will feel familiar. On the Data section you fill in four lists:

• Values: what is being measured, such as Calories, Distance, or Average Heart Rate. You can add more than one.
• Rows: how the data is broken down down the side of the table, such as by Activity.
• Columns: how the data is broken down across the top, such as by month.
• Filters: which values to include, chosen right on the finished table or chart rather than in the editor.

Rows and Columns can each hold more than one entry, which nests them — Activity within Provider, for example — and you can drag the entries to reorder them. Each measure is summarized the way that measure is normally summarized, so Calories are totalled while Average Heart Rate is averaged, and you do not have to choose.

What you can break the data down by depends on what you are measuring. Alongside Date, Activity, Provider, Source, Meal, and Glucose Context, FitnessSyncer offers the descriptive fields inside the data itself — whether an activity was entered by hand or recorded by a device, an activity’s Title, which food a nutrition entry was for, a cycle tracking entry’s Flow Level, an ECG’s Classification, and so on. Each of these is named after the kind of data it comes from, such as “Nutrition: Food” or “Sleep: Sleep Type”, so you can tell at a glance which ones suit what you are measuring.

Two of them apply to everything you track, whatever you are measuring: Tag, and Comment. Because an entry can carry several tags at once, picking a tag in the Filters list gives you every entry carrying that tag, even if it has others too. Used as a Row or Column instead, an entry’s tags are shown together as one group, so the totals still add up.

Comment tells you whether you wrote a note on an entry rather than what the note said — grouping by the note itself would give you one row per entry.

Choosing Date lets you also choose how finely to break it up — by day, week, month, or year.

Filters

Anything you put in the Filters list appears above the finished table or chart as a set of checkboxes, one per value actually present in your data. Tick the ones you want and press Apply. Long lists can be searched, and unticking everything gives you an empty table rather than putting everything back.

Filtering this way is temporary and only affects your current view, so you can explore freely without changing the report. Save the report to keep the filters you have chosen. If you set them while editing the chart, they become the chart’s starting point every time it is loaded.

Filters also work in the FitnessSyncer apps for iOS and Android. Tick the values you want and tap Apply, and just that table or chart is redrawn. As on the website, what you choose in the apps only changes your current view; to keep a set of filters, save the report on FitnessSyncer.com. Older versions of the apps show a Pivot Table or Pivot Chart with its saved filters already applied, without the checkboxes.

Pivot Charts

A Pivot Chart is the same thing drawn as a graph instead of a table; the same Rows, Columns, Values, and Filters, so you can build one and see it either way. Choose the shape with the Draw As option at the top of the Data section ; only the shapes that can sensibly draw a table of numbers are offered, and a Pie or Donut will use the row totals.

As with other charts, you can read a Pivot Table’s underlying data with the table icon beside it, and download it from there.

Key Performance Indicators

Key Performance Indicators are summaries of your data into a single numerical value which can help quickly drive action.

To produce the single numerical value, Key Performance Indicators summarize the data first by data period (Daily, Weekly, or Monthly per the Chart Granularity ), and then summarizes each of the periods to produce a single end value.

There are three types of Key Performance Visualizations:

• Key Performance Indicator: This is a textual representation of the number, which includes the number, unit, and title.
• Solid Gauge: This is a percentage-based representation of the number, which shows the number on a gauge up to 100%.
• Three Ring Chart: This is a percentage-based representation of up to 3 individual percentages.

For the Key Performance Indicator, blood pressure and body mass index values will be colored based on whether it is considered high or not. You can disable this in the chart’s General settings .

A Key Performance Indicator can also carry a small graph of the periods behind the number. Turn on Include graph in the chart’s General settings and the tile gains a sparkline of each period that went into the value, so you can see whether a figure you are happy with arrived steadily or in one spike. Where the change from the previous period is larger than the metric normally moves, the tile also reports that change; a difference smaller than the usual variation is left off, because calling ordinary week-to-week movement a trend is how a number starts to mislead.

For the Solid Gauge and Three Ring Charts, the numbers should be a percentage to make sense on the chart. Otherwise, the results may not make sense. If you are a user of FitnessSyncer Goals, we will automatically convert Goal-based metrics to a percentage based on the stated goal.

Collections

FitnessSyncer provides two different types of collections.

The first type of collection is the Preconfigured Collections, which you can choose from:

• Goal KPI Set: This is a set of Key Performance Indicators all based on your configured goals and shows you data such as how often you have met your configured goals.
• Goal Progress by Period: A grid of every goal you have set against each recent period, colored by whether that period met its target, with the figure you recorded in each cell. It answers “which goals am I actually keeping?” across all of them at once, which a chart per goal cannot.
• Goal Progress Today: One bar per goal showing how far along you are toward today’s target, with the target marked. Goals that run downward, such as a weight or calorie ceiling, are drawn the same way as goals that run upward, so a full bar always means you are doing well.
• ShoeRenew Lifetime Solid Gauge Set: This will display a Solid Gauge for each of your configured FitnessSyncer ShoeRenew tasks so you can quickly tell how your shoes or other tracked equipment is doing.

The second type of collection is the Preconfigured Table Collection, which you can choose from:

• Personal Details Table: This table shows you your personal details.
• Allergies: These tables will allow you to show all, current, or past allergies you have had.
• Conditions: These tables will allow you to show all, current, or past conditions you have had.
• Medications: These tables will allow you to show all, current, or past medications you have been on.

UI Items

To help you create very usable Dashboards, we have included a set of UI components.

Report Navigation

Report Navigation allows you to link a few dashboards together and quickly navigate to them by picking one.

When you select this option, the Reports section will appear when you can drag reports you have previously created from the Reports Available section to the Reports section or to reorder items in the list.

Section Break

Section Break divides sections of reports. It does not include any visual change on the dashboard itself.

Source Filter

Source Filter allows you to quickly filter based on a particular source based on its name. For example, if you name your Activity and Sleep feeds the same name for Fitbit, you can quickly filter the report to just the data from Fitbit using this option.

Title

The Title item allows you to put in labels within the reports. In the General section you can enter in a Title, Subtitle, and for select accounts, Images.

The Chart Editor

When you add or edit a chart, its settings are split into four sections.

Chart

The Chart section is where one selects the chart type (as described above) and options for that chart. Options are based on the chart type itself and include:

• Number Format Styling, such as whether to show the decimal or not or whether the results are time-based.
• Labeler: Some charts require the data to be labeled to make sense on the chart.
• Scatter Type: Type of scatter Algorithm. One field against another puts the first field you chose on the horizontal axis and the second on the vertical, one point per day, either on the same day or with the second read the next day, such as steps against that night’s sleep. The subtitle says how many days had both and, once there are at least 30, how closely the two moved together. Moving together does not mean one causes the other.
• Reducer per Period
• Reducer for the Final Result for Key Performance Indicators
• Heat Map Type
• Table Sorting and Grouping
• Table option for creating a Goal-based table.
• Table option for adding the total row (if more than 1 row present)
• Data Order Reversal for Charts like Column Charts
• Granularity for the data, including by Second, Minute and Hour if your data sources permit. A chart draws one point for every period, so the finest settings cover a shorter span than the rest: a chart by Minute shows the last three days and a chart by Second shows the last day, while Hour and everything coarser uses the whole date range you have selected.
• How do you wish to treat No Data? You can either treat it as not present (default) or 0.
• How do you wish to treat zero? You can either treat it as 0 (default) or not present.

Labelers include:

• Source of the Data (Default)
• Time of Day
• Relative Time of Day (such as Morning, Noon, Evening)
• Meal (such as Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner)
• Activity Name
• Data Unit
• Glucose Context
• Static values, such as Calories

Data

The Data section is shown whenever data is required.

If the chart requires a single item, the UI will be a simple data selector for the data type.

If multiple items can be used, you can add many data items to the chart or remove items from the current list. We recommend that you do not mix disparate data types, for example, displaying Miles and Kilometers data fields.

A few charts that require a certain number of data fields to be entered. For example, the Variwide Pie Chart requires exactly two data fields, and the Three Ring Chart requires at most three data fields.

General

The General section is shown for various chart contexts. It includes the following settings based on the current chart:

• Title of the Chart
• Subtitle of the Chart
• Option to show certain charts as 100% width as opposed to the natural size of the chart.
• Option to show something even if the chart has no data.
• Option to show or hide the X and Y Axis on the Charts themselves
• Option to show goals as part of the Chart.
• Ability to override the Scope and Graph By options for the chart.

Filters

Most charts will include a Filters section if it works with data. These filters work identically to other FitnessSyncer Filters.