Any Number on Any Screen: How to Build a Comms Dashboard

Imagine whenever you needed the time, you had to step outside, walk to the end of the block, and squint to read the clock on a belfry?

Is it time for the all-hands meeting? Just five minutes, I’ll go check...

And so you’d whittle the day away, doing nothing all that productive.

No, time is important. So we went to the other extreme. We put it on our wrists, dedicated a corner of our phones and computers to it, and placed it on walls, car dashboards, and microwave ovens (though odds are, that last clock’s wrong). Time’s everywhere, today.

But your sales figures and KPIs and product launch countdown and NPS score and stock price and all those other facts and figures that represent the lifeblood of your company, they’re hidden, a half-dozen clicks away at the best of times, an annoying login and CAPTCHA and filters and finessing away for minutes at the worst. You don’t have time for that.

If a number matters enough to stake your career, your team’s work this quarter, on it, then it’s important enough to have as omnipresent as the time. Here’s how to put your most important numbers on the wall, with ScreenCloud digital signage.

A quick digital signage explainer

Your team members each have phones—but phones are a distraction minefield. They’re working on a computer—but would waste valuable work minutes digging up stats when needed. Your team needs a third screen, the office equivalent of the departures and arrivals board at an airport, something they can glance at momentarily, see the value that everything hinges on, then get back to the task at hand.

Already have digital signage in your office? Perfect—all you need to do is get that most valuable number isolated and visible on your screens.

If you’re new to digital signage, start first with ScreenCloud’s training to set up your first digital signage. The basics are the same everywhere: Start with a screen (a conference room TV, perhaps, a spare computer monitor, or even an iPad), install the ScreenCloud app or a ScreenCloud OS device, then start adding your company’s software and data to your signage.

It’s easy to build out your first slides in ScreenCloud Canvas, add weather and presentations and schedules and more with ScreenCloud Integrations, or even put your next Zoom conference on the big screen with ScreenCloud Broadcast.

But what about getting those most important numbers in front of your company, a glance away anytime they’re needed? That’s where this guide comes in.

How to get a static value on a screen

The easiest number to get on your digital signage is a static one.

Say you have one key goal you want to keep in front of your team’s mind, a single key result that everyone’s driving towards. It’s something that’s going to stay the same, for the next few months at least. All you need for that is a slide.

ScreenCloud has two great built-in apps for that. Noticeboard is the quickest. Type text, add a background image if you want, and pick an icon to highlight your message. That’s it: ScreenCloud will make your facts and figures look great, automatically.

Or, for more customization, use ScreenCloud Canvas, with a PowerPoint-style editor to arrange text, images, and shapes into detailed slides that highlight your most important number. It’ll take a few more minutes than Noticeboard, but you can make something more unique and eye-catching, too.

If you already have a presentation in Google Slides—or a PowerPoint deck you could import—ScreenCloud’s Google Slides integration can also put your slides on your signage, no extra work needed.

How to get a changing value on a screen.

Those are all well and good for static, unchanging values. Goals. Plans. Things you’re working towards.

Are you going to hit those goals, though? How are sales looking this week? Did that blog post boost your blog traffic, or did your end-of-month promotion boost your Google and Yelp review ratings? Is the support team getting those answers out faster than before?

Those are moving figures. Every new sale and email and rating and visit changes things. Your team doesn’t just need to know the goal—they need to know if they’re getting there, or if they need to correct course.

The easiest way to get those live values on a screen is with ScreenCloud’s app integrations. Depending on what you’re looking for, they might get your number out of your app and onto the big screen just by entering your page link or copying an embed code. Those include:

• Google Trends, to see if more people are searching for your business
• Page Likes for Facebook, to see if more people liked your page
• Google Reviews and Yelp, to see recent reviews along with a review count and average rating
• Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar, to show upcoming events
• Zendesk Reports, to see the number of open tickets, response time, and other key figures
• GeckoBoard, to showcase a full dashboard of facts and figures

Any app that has an embed code can work directly with ScreenCloud Embed, too. For example, you can build an Airtable dashboard with widgets that highlight the most important stats from your database, then copy the embed code and display your Airtable dashboard in your digital signage.

Or, for something more custom, you can code a webpage in ScreenCloud Playgrounds to showcase a value, or use ScreenCloud Page Scroll to feature your existing website—especially one with a prominent number you want to feature—on signage.

Push any value you want to a screen, from chat or a spreadsheet

Want to customize exactly what goes on your screen, without coding? ScreenCloud has a number of options there, too.

Chat is the most straightforward option. ScreenCloud can show the latest message from any channel in either Microsoft Teams or Slack chat. That’s a perfect hack to quickly update a value for your team.

Create a new chat channel for your signage, and post a message whenever your important number changes—say, when a new sale comes in. Select that channel in ScreenCloud, and it’ll put the latest message on your signage automatically.

Spreadsheets are the most flexible option. You can embed any Google Sheets or Excel spreadsheet or graph in ScreenCloud. Got a number in your spreadsheet—perhaps one that’s already auto-updated from your company’s data? Excel is easiest, as ScreenCloud connects directly to Excel Online. Just sign into OneDrive from ScreenCloud, choose your spreadsheet, then select the cell range to display. For Google Sheets, you’ll need to open your spreadsheet and copy the embed code separately. In your Google Sheets spreadsheet, click File > Share > Publish to Web > Embed, then copy the code. Go back to ScreenCloud, paste your embed code into ScreenCloud, select the cell range you want to display, and voilà.

You can customize your spreadsheet, to make your number stand out on the big screen. For a title and single value, I used two spreadsheet cells, with 48 and 36-point type, respectively, resized the columns and centered the text, and added a bit of color. To make your embed not look like a spreadsheet, hide the cells (in Google Sheets, click View > Show, then uncheck the Gridlines option; in Excel, click the View tab then uncheck Gridlines—though Excel embeds hide gridlines automatically)

You can customize your embed, too. The default ScreenCloud spreadsheet embed shows a bit of spreadsheet branding, and lets you customize which cells to show. You could, instead, use the more generic ScreenCloud Embed app, then customize your embed manually. For example, with the Google Sheets embed, you can add the following code after the Google Sheets link’s /pubhtml text to show just your cells (B1 to B2, in this example) without branding:

?gid=0&chrome=false&range=B1:B2

That gives you a perfect, single value to showcase on a ScreenCloud Channel in a multi-widget layout that features your single value along with data from your team’s other apps.

Automatically update your spreadsheet or chat value, with Zapier or IFTTT

That also gives you a single value that’s easy to update, automatically.

Your spreadsheet might already be a repository of data, with that single value on your ScreenCloud dashboard representing complicated formulas and rows of data condensed into a takeaway. Or, you could pull in data from elsewhere, and in the process make a smart spreadsheet and signage dashboard at the same time.

We’ll use Zapier in this tutorial, since it integrates with the widest range of software, but any automation tool could work—IFTTT, Make, Microsoft Power Automate, and more. 

The goal is to pull data from one app, automatically, and put it in your spreadsheet. Every time a new Shopify order comes into your store, or a new Todoist task is checked off by your team, or a new person signs up for your email newsletter, Zapier can track that. Start your workflow with the app that has your data, and have Zapier watch for that new thing.

Then, you’ll need to do something with the data. Odds are you don’t just want to know that someone signed up, or that a new sale came in—you’ll want to know how many people signed up this month or how many sales you’ve had this quarter. You could add a Google Sheets Lookup Spreadsheet Row action, if you want, to find your original value from your spreadsheet, then add a Zapier Formatter action to add the new value with the old, and finally a Google Sheets Update Row action to update your spreadsheet value with the new one.

You could also skip all the trouble in Zapier, and just have the automation platform add the data as a new row to your spreadsheet. Then, the value that you showcase in ScreenCloud should be a formula, perhaps a =sum(A:A) to add up all the values that Zapier adds to your spreadsheet, or a =countif(B:B,"*") to track how many closed tasks or total sales are in your sheet.

Or, skip the spreadsheet, use the Slack or Teams integration above, and have Zapier automatically post a Slack message whenever a new sales comes in. It’d be a quick way to get updated about data, without having to worry about how you store and format it.

Now the next time you peek at your ScreenCloud Dashboard, you’ll see the most recent value, automatically updated whenever anything new comes in.

Extract any value, from any app, with ScreenCloud Dashboards

Then for the last—perhaps best—trick up ScreenCloud’s sleeves: Dashboards. Because odds are, you don’t actually need to use a spreadsheet or database to pull all of your data together. That most important value is already visible somewhere in your software. All you need to do is pull it out.

ScreenCloud Dashboards lets you pull any data from any app. It’s built around software that already has your data in dashboards—Salesforce, Trello, Grafana, Jira, Tableau, Google Data Studio, GitHub, and more—but it doesn’t stop there. Anything that’s on a website or app, Dashboards can display. You just need a ScreenCloud Pro or Enterprise account to use it.

Here’s how it works. First, click the Dashboards tab in ScreenCloud, click New Dashboard, and enter the URL you want to pull data from in the address bar. The easiest option, often, is to enter a link directly to the file, dashboard, note, or other item you want to share.

ScreenCloud will then open a new window. Log into your app, if needed, and find that bit of data you want to showcase. Then click Finish Journey & Take Snapshot on the bottom of ScreenCloud’s window. Hover over anything—and you’ll now notice a red square, highlighting the elements that ScreenCloud can copy. Select the number and text you want, then click the final Finish Journey button that appears after you make your selection. Back in the original ScreenCloud page, you can title the value you just selected, save it, then preview how it’ll look on your signage.

Dashboards work with almost anything. You can embed a bit from your Notion notes, then update your signage by updating that line in Notion. You can embed a single Airtable widget or full dashboard, or build a Smartsheet dashboard and put it on the big screen.

Pull it all together into a digital signage dashboard

You’ve got your numbers, pulled in with ScreenCloud integrations, distilled with spreadsheet integrations, and extracted with ScreenCloud Dashboard. Now, it’s time to bring it all together.

You could put a single value on your screen. If it’s important enough, that could be the best route. If so, just add your integration, embed, or dashboard to a ScreenCloud playlist, push it to your screen, and your data will be on the screen when you need it.

A single value, though, might do better alongside other data. Perhaps you have an announcement or dashboard that should take up the majority of the screen, plus a few individual facts and figures to share as well. For that, use ScreenCloud Channels. There, you can choose a multi-widget layout, putting individual facts in smaller boxes, or even in a news-style ticker tape on the bottom of your screen.

Experiment to find what fits your data best, and then you’re done. You’ve got the data out of your apps, put it on your screen, and saved you and your team the time of searching for it again, every time you need to check your sales or stats.

That is, until something new comes up, and you find yourself clicking through menus, filtering and finessing until you find that bit of data you need. Don’t stop there. Take a few extra moments to add it to your digital signage in ScreenCloud, and the next time you need that number, it’ll be right there for you. That’s how some of the fastest growing, most productive small businesses and enterprises alike use ScreenCloud to power their KPI dashboards, build digital calendars, streamline internal communications, and more.