Dashboard overview
The dashboard shows you all the latest activity across the projects you're a part of. It'll also show a list of projects on the righthand side of the page and which company those projects are related to.
Jump ahead to:
- Latest activity
- To-dos, Calendar, Time tabs
- Create a new project
- Archived projects
- Recovering deleted projects
- Global RSS feeds
- Templates
Latest activity
The Latest Activity block shows up to 7 recently-updated projects, and always shows at least the 5 most recent changes in each project. It may show more changes if there are fewer than 7 projects to display. This format is fixed so it's not possible to choose a different amount to display.
The 14-day view is the only one available in the Dashboard. To view more dates, click on the “Calendar” tab at the top of the screen.
Items on the Dashboard or Overview are generated automatically from recent activity so there’s no way to prevent them from showing up or removing ones that are there. They cycle off when new items are added.
To-dos, Calendar, and Time tabs
These tabs let you see a list of those respective items across all projects. You can see the items belonging to an individual, a company, or just view all of them.
On the To-dos tab, you can see all to-dos assigned to your users in your company across all projects.
On the Calendar tab, you’ll see milestones and events laid out in calendar view, and you can sort by assignee, too:
On the Time tab, you’ll be able to create time reports and filter by user and time period:
These tabs will only show tasks assigned to people in the account owner’s company, so you can’t use them to see tasks for clients.
Creating new projects
Click on the +Create New Project button on the righthand side of the Dashboard. On the next page, you'll enter in the project name and decide who should be able to access the project. You can adjust this later as well!
If you have a project template you wanted to use, this is the perfect time to choose that on the top righthand side of the page.
You can archive a project in any paid plan. An archived project is a project that is frozen in time and can’t be changed. All the data is left intact, but you can’t add, edit, or remove anything until you un-archive it. More on archiving here.
To reopen an archived project:
1. Click the “archived projects” link on the right side of your Dashboard.
2. Next click the name of the project you want to un-archive, then the “Project Settings” link at the top of the screen.
3. Change the Project Status from Archived to Active and click “save changes.”
Recovering deleted projects
If it is a project that was deleted, any of your admins will see a new link on the sidebar of the dashboard:
Clicking that link will take them to a page showing all recently deleted projects, including when they were deleted, and who deleted them:
To recover any of those projects, simply click the corresponding “restore” link, and you’ll be back in business!
Global RSS feeds
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) lets you subscribe to specific content feeds and aggregate this information in one place to be read when you’re ready. Think of it as a feed of all your Basecamp project activities delivered to you so you can read through it when you want.
This page goes over the details on how to set it up.
You can subscribe to all milestones and events at once by clicking the “Global iCalendar” feed at the bottom of the Dashboard.
You can also subscribe to projects individually by going into a project, clicking the Calendar tab, and clicking the “Subscribe to iCalendar” link at the bottom of the page.
The advantage to subscribing to individual iCalendars is that your calendar program may allow you to color code each project’s iCalendar differently. The global iCalendar file will list all milestones and events in the same color since all the events are part of one big calendar.
Templates
Templates are wonderful when you know you need to a create a project over and over again so you don't have to start from scratch each time.
First, go to the Dashboard and click the Templates tab (upper right).
You’ll default to the view for Project templates, as opposed to to-do templates. Project templates let you set up a standardized project with to-dos, milestones, and messages. You can then use this project template to create new projects. A new project created from a project template will be auto-populated with all the to-do lists, milestones, and messages from the template. It’s a huge time saver that’s especially useful if you do lots of similar projects.
Click the button that says New project template and name the project template (example: “Redesign Template” or “Seminar Template”). Then add the content you want to show up in this template.
You can only assign milestones or to-dos to people in your own company when you are creating the templates. When you actually create a project from a template you can go in and assign to-dos and milestones to anyone else from any other company that you assign to the project.
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