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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2026-10-16
Concept: Analytics Dashboards

Concept: Analytics Dashboards

Analytics dashboards provide an interactive reporting experience that enables organizations to consolidate, analyze, and personalize metrics from multiple custom and standard reports within Workday. Rather than navigating separate reports or static worklets, workers can interact with a unified dashboard to isolate key metrics across functional areas, explore visual hierarchies, and save custom configurations for routine analysis.
On a worker's first visit to a published analytics dashboard, Workday displays an interactive guided tour in the header. The tour walks workers through how to filter data across multiple levels, customize card layouts, and export visualization findings.

Dashboard Structure and Layout

Analytics dashboards organize visual reporting components across structured navigation layers:
  • Tabs: Each dashboard supports up to 15 custom tabs, enabling authors to categorize metrics logically by business theme, organizational department, or time period.
  • Visualization Cards: Each tab supports up to 12 visualization cards. Visualization cards render data from underlying custom or standard reports as interactive charts or tables, such as bar charts, line graphs, donut charts, or matrix grids.
  • Custom and Standard Reports: Visualizations connect directly to Workday Report Writer reports. Reports do not require the
    Enable as Worklet
     option selected on the report definition to render as visualization cards.

Prompt Mapping and Multi-Level Filtering

Prompt mapping enables dynamic data filtering across multiple visualization cards without requiring manual entry on individual underlying reports. When underlying report data sources expose matching prompt fields, such as fiscal period, cost center, or company, authors can configure prompt keys at 2 levels:
  • Global Dashboard Prompts: Apply prompt selections across all tabs and visualization cards on the dashboard simultaneously.
  • Tab Prompts: Apply prompt selections only to visualization cards residing on a specific tab.
When workers adjust a mapped prompt control, Workday updates all corresponding visualization cards in real time to reflect the filtered criteria.
Prompt controls also support these behaviors:
  • Dependent prompts narrow the available selections based on the values of other prompts.
  • Prompts display in the order authors configure them.
  • Workers can clear a prompt value.
  • Supported prompt types include boolean, date, time, date/time with time zone, numeric including decimals and negative values, currency, and single- or multi-instance fields.
  • Prompt values display according to each worker's preferences for date format, 12-hour or 24-hour time, and decimal separator.

Personalization and Custom Views

Analytics dashboards separate the published layout from individual worker customizations to preserve dashboards while supporting personalized analysis.
The
Original View
 is the published layout created and maintained by authors. Any structural edits, new visualization cards, or prompt key adjustments made by authors update the
Original View
 for all workers who have access.
Workers viewing a shared dashboard can enter
Layout Mode
 to reorder, resize, hide visualization cards, or apply specific prompt filters. Workers can save up to 12 personal custom views per dashboard. Personal custom views preserve individual layout preferences and prompt selections without altering the author's
Original View
 or affecting other workers.
If a worker leaves a dashboard with unsaved filter or layout changes, Workday displays a confirmation prompting them to discard or save the changes. Workers can't switch between custom views from within
Layout Mode
 while changes remain unsaved.Workers cannot add new custom reports or visualization cards to a shared dashboard; only administrators or authors with Modify permissions can add or edit dashboard content.

Two-Layer Security Model

Workday enforces a two-layer security model to govern task access and report data visibility on analytics dashboards. Permissions on the
Manage: Analytics Dashboards
 domain in the System functional area govern task access.
  • View
     access enables workers to run, filter, and personalize dashboards using the
    View Analytics Dashboard
     and
    Maintain Analytics Dashboards
     tasks.
  • Modify
     access enables authors to build, edit, share, and delete dashboards using the
    Create Analytics Dashboard
    ,
    Edit Analytics Dashboard
    , and
    Share Analytics Dashboard
     tasks.
Security access to underlying report data sources, business objects, and report fields governs what data workers see inside visualization cards. Having domain access on
Manage: Analytics Dashboards
 allows a worker to open a dashboard, but Workday displays data only for the specific report fields and instances that the worker's security profile permits. If a worker doesn't have access to an underlying report data source, Workday displays a lock icon on the visualization card and disables the
Run Report
 option.

Performance and Queries

To maintain tenant responsiveness, Workday executes visualization report queries when a dashboard loads:
  • Query Timeouts: Individual visualization card queries time out after 45 seconds.
  • Automatic Retries: If a visualization query fails to load or times out, Workday automatically retries the query up to 3 times before displaying a localized error banner on that card.
  • Undefined Prompt Behavior: Reports with undefined prompt defaults appear in the report catalog search, but you must populate all undefined prompt defaults on the underlying report definition before adding the report as a visualization card or publishing the dashboard.