If you find yourself or your team creating a similar presentation over and over, templates are a great way to streamline your workflow. Once you have the presentation looking just the way you want, make a template from it so that future presentations are not only quick, but consistent.
A template is a saved set of visualizations, configurations, and layout for a set of target series. In Rhiza Premium, templates are primarily used by sales people to quickly create visually pleasing, data-rich stories that drive ad sales.
As a template creator, you decide what the story is and how best to tell it. You then use the necessary datasets, target series, visualizations, and formatting to create a presentation. Once you are happy with how your presentation looks, you create a template from it (deciding which data inputs the template consumer can change) and then share it with those who should have access to it.
Considerations for Creating a Template
You want to create a template that can be used by multiple consumers, for multiple clients, or both. This requires some careful planning.
Tip 1: Expose only those variables your user really needs to be able to change. For example, if your user will be pitching multiple car dealerships, but always in the same market, unlock the dealer name but not the market name.
Note: You can used linked series to make your templates cleaner for consumers. It requires much more planning on the back end but results in a nicer consumer experience. We will have more documentation and training on how to use linked series soon.
Tip 2: Name the inputs something the user will understand, and add help text if you think the user might run into trouble. For example, even if a user is constrained to a particular market in a template, he or she can enter any car dealership in the United States in the dealer input. If the user enters a dealer that isn't in the market the template is scoped to, the presentation won't have any data in it. Take a few minutes and make sure the user has a bit of help.
Tip 3: Consider leaving default values in the input fields.
Tip 4: Give visualizations generic but useful titles. You don't want to use a specific dealer or market or target name in a visualization name, unless the template is meant to be used only for that market or dealer or target. We suggest you take a few minutes to look at what the Nielsen templates have done. The user can always change the visualization titles to be more specific after the presentation is created.
Tip 5: Take advantage of the Switch Mode button frequently as you work to see how your presentation will look to the person who will be consuming it from a template. See How Can a Rhiza Basic User Modify a Presentation? for more information.
Tip 6: Use section and visualization notes to help guide the person who will be using this presentation. It might not be obvious to him or her what a particular visualization is meant to show. See Adding notes to sections and Adding notes to visualizations.
Tip 7: Remember that regardless of how you format your presentation online, once it's exported to PowerPoint, each visualization will have its own slide. For more information, see Generate a Microsoft PowerPoint Version of Your Presentation.
Tip 8: After you publish your template, take it for a test drive. Make sure the experience is what you expect, and -- more importantly -- what your end-user will find easy to use.
Tip 9: Don't forget to share your template with the appropriate groups when it's ready to go!