How to use the Pulse view in your libraries
Your Insights, Opportunities, Solutions, Goals, and Journeys libraries can each open as a Pulse view: a dashboard that sits alongside the table and summarizes what your data is telling you. Instead of scrolling a wall of rows, you see where your building blocks cluster, what needs attention, and how things are trending over time, and you can act on any of it without leaving the view.
What the Pulse view is for
A library table is built for working through items one by one. The Pulse view is built for reading the whole library at a glance and telling a story with it. It answers two kinds of question:
- Storytelling: what is happening across this library? Widgets that show how your building blocks are distributed, for example how they break down by status, type, or a tag group, and how that distribution has grown over time. This is the "where is our effort going, and how is it changing?" picture that owners and executives want to see.
- Where to act: what should I look at next? Widgets that rank the items most worth acting on, so the things that need attention rise to the top instead of being buried in the list.
A Pulse view reads from the same connected data as the table beside it. The Pulse view does not create anything new; it is another way of looking at the building blocks you already have.
Open the Pulse view
Pulse is a view layout, the same as Table, List, Matrix, and Map, so you reach it the way you reach any view.
- Open an Insights, Opportunities, Solutions, Goals, or Journeys library.
- Create a new view and choose the Pulse layout, or open an existing Pulse view from its tab.
Because it is a saved view, a Pulse view can carry its own filters and its own name, and it appears as a tab at the top of the library for everyone in the workspace. You might keep one Pulse view filtered to a single team and another to a whole portfolio. The widgets and interactions are the same in every library, so anything you set up on one carries over to the rest. For the full mechanics of creating, naming, filtering, and sharing views, see How to create and manage views.
Note: To create or save a view you need edit access, specifically the Manage views permission that workspace editors and admins have. With viewer access you can still open and read any Pulse view that has been published.
Every chart is a way in
The Pulse view is not just for reading. Every widget is actionable: click a bar, a segment, or an item in a ranked list, and the records behind it open so you can work with them directly. From there you can:
- Bulk tag the selected building blocks.
- Filter down to that slice and keep exploring.
- Save a view from the selection, so a cut worth returning to becomes its own tab.
- Hand off to Ask TheyDo, sending the selection to the TheyDo Agent to summarize, reframe, or take further.
This is what makes Pulse more than a chart. You spot a pattern, click straight into it, and act on the exact items involved. To go deeper on what the agent can do with a selection, see What is the TheyDo Agent?
Choose which widgets you see
Not every widget is relevant to every library or every audience. Use the visibility panel to show or hide widgets in a Pulse view, then save those preferences into the view itself, so the next person who opens that tab sees the same focused dashboard you set up.
Tip: Set up a Pulse view per audience. A tight, two-widget view for a leadership update reads very differently from a fuller one you use to work through a backlog, and each can be saved as its own tab.
Get more out of your charts
The widgets are only as rich as the data behind them. When a building block has no value set for the property a widget groups by, for example no status assigned, it shows up in a neutral grey rather than one of your colors. A lot of grey is a useful signal in itself: it means those properties are not filled in yet.
Tip: If your charts look mostly grey, that is a prompt to fill in the missing properties. As you assign statuses, types, and tags, the Pulse view turns from grey blocks into a colored story you can actually present.
Getting your taxonomy and statuses in order pays off directly here: better-tagged building blocks make for sharper storytelling and more accurate ranked lists.