ANNEX: Customizing the Dashboard

The Dashboard is not user-customizable or editable on-line, but is if you’ve installed it on your computer.

Customizing Your Dashboard View

Customizing your Dashboard view is done by controlling what you actually see on your screen. You can easily “forget” thoughts, or even whole groups of thoughts, that might be of little interest to you. You don’t have to actually delete those thoughts to get them to not show on your screen, allowing you to revisit the forgotten thoughts at any time. In Windows, just right-click on a thought and “forget” it. If you still see it on your screen (albeit grayed out) go to “Options” at the top of your screen and unclick the “Show Forgotten Thoughts” box.

Note that to recognize the fact that this Dashboard has been extracted from the larger Climate Web climate knowledge system, we’ve included a Climate Web logo in the upper left of your screen that shows up whenever you’re viewing the home thought of the Dashboard: Your Climate Dashboard. It represents a “dynamic wallpaper.” If you want to get rid of it at some point you can click on the “Types” icon at the top left of your screen (a super-imposed triangle-circle-square, located right next to the icon looking like a “tag”). From there you can delete the “Climate Dashboard Wallpaper.”

Also, right now the Dashboard is set up to show you “sibling thoughts” after you’ve clicked on a specific thought. In other words, when you click on a thought in the Dashboard the rest of the other thoughts shift to the right hand side of the Plex where you can scroll thought them. But to create a less busy interface, you can easily deselect the “sibling thoughts” view by going to the “Options” dropdown at top left, selecting Preferences, and then under Look and Feel unclicking the “Show Siblings” box half-way down the list.

As you’ll see in the Preferences section you have lots of options for customizing TheBrain software, but none of them are key to using the Dashboard.

Adding to Your Dashboard

You can easily add your own content to your Dashboard. If you right-click (Windows) on the “home” thought Your Climate Dashboard you can “Create Child,” assign it a name, assign it to “Dashboard Types,” and add the URL you want to have pop open.

The main trick to adding content to the Dashboard is to realize that it’s organized numerically. All the thoughts are of the same “Type,” specifically Dashboard Thoughts -, so numerically organized thoughts will all show up in the right order. The numbers themselves are hidden by placing the number at the front of a thought and preceding the number with a “period.” To see a thought’s number click on the thought to center it on your screen, then click on it again to open it up for editing. You’ll see its number at the far left. Because it’s a four digit hidden number you have a lot of flexibility in adding content between 0000 and 9999. The sections of the Dashboard are numbered in such a way that a lot of content can be added to a section without creating a problem for the rest of the Dashboard.

This may take you a couple minutes to sort out, but it’s very straightforward and that’s all you really need to know!

Updating Your Dashboard

This Dashboard is largely “self-updating” in the sense that it links you to to web content that is itself being regularly updated. But we’ve also built the Dashboard in such a way that we can email users a small update file that can be instantly “imported” to display new content without disrupting any customization the user may already have done.

Now That You’ve Downloaded TheBrain

We’d encourage you to think about what else you can use the software for (even the free version)! It’s a powerful and remarkably easy to use knowledge management software for everything from climate change to your household inventory! There are plenty of explanatory materials at TheBrain’s website, and they do weekly calls that you can access on YouTube.