Announcements

An announcement is a short message for everyone who walks past the office screen, such as "Friday drinks at 16:00" or "Fire drill on Tuesday". You write it once on Announcements, choose when it runs and on which dashboards, and OfficeDash shows it on the TV for as long as it is live.

1. Write an announcement

1. Open Announcements and press New announcement.
2. Type a Title. It can be up to 100 characters.
3. Type the Message. It can be up to 500 characters.
4. Choose a Tone, set the dates and choose where it shows, as described in the next sections.
5. Press Add announcement. Press Cancel to close the window without saving.

The list shows the newest announcement first. Each card shows whether the announcement is Live, Scheduled or Ended, its tone, its dates, its text and where it shows.

The title and message are shown exactly as you type them. Formatting and HTML are not interpreted, so keep the text plain.

To change an announcement, press Edit on its card, change what you need and press Save changes. To remove one, press Delete and confirm with Yes, delete. Deleting cannot be undone. The buttons New announcement, Edit and Delete only appear if your account allows you to create, edit or remove announcements. The account holder can always do all three.

2. Tone

Tone is Info, Celebrate or Warning. Info is selected for a new announcement. The tone is shown as a label on the card in the list, so you can tell your announcements apart at a glance. It does not change how the announcement looks on your paired TV.

3. Start and end dates

Start date (optional) and End date (optional) decide when an announcement is live.

• With both left empty, the announcement is live as soon as you save it and stays live until you edit or delete it.
• With a start date, it is Scheduled until that day and Live from then on.
• With an end date, it is Live up to and including that day, and Ended the day after.

An end date before the start date is refused. The card shows the dates as "From", "Until" or as a range.

4. Choose the dashboards

Show on decides which dashboards show the announcement.

• All dashboards is the default. The announcement shows on every screen of your account.
• Only these dashboards lets you tick one or more dashboards. This choice only appears when your account has at least one dashboard, and you need to tick at least one. Ticking a dashboard selects this choice for you, and going back to All dashboards clears the ticks.

The card ends with "Shows on:" and the dashboards it is meant for. You create dashboards on Dashboards.

5. Where it shows on the TV

A paired TV shows announcements through the Announcements widget. A widget is one block on a slide, and a new dashboard already has a starter slide that holds this widget. To place it on another slide, open the dashboard on Dashboards, press Add widget on a spot and pick Announcements. Widgets are explained in Widgets and tile sizes and the editor in Dashboards and the slide editor.

The widget shows:

• Only announcements that are live today, by the date at the location of the dashboard.
• Announcements for All dashboards, plus the ones you chose for this dashboard. Announcements that are only for other dashboards do not appear.
• The newest first. The number you set in the widget's Settings is a maximum, and a small tile can show fewer: about one to three, depending on its size.
• The title and the message. Long messages can be shortened on the screen, so keep them brief.

When nothing is live, the widget says "No announcements right now" (or its equivalent in the language of the TV). The public demo at /demo shows sample announcements, not yours.