To make it easier to assemble your views and dashboards, Watson Analytics provides you with templates. They contain predefined layouts and grid lines, for easy arrangement and alignment of visualizations in a view.

As we did with predictions (earlier in this chapter), let's take a look at the Assemble process.

From the main or welcome page, click on the plus, or Add New, icon (shown in the following screenshot). Then click on Assemble:

When creating a new assemble, you'll need to choose a data file (as shown in the next screenshot) from the list displayed in the Create new view dialog (of course, as usual, you can also upload a new file):

Once you select which data file you want to use (simply by clicking on the filename), Watson Analytics shows you the Create View page, as shown here:

Notice that the Name your view field defaults to the name of the file that you selected, and you'll want to change that. Click inside the textbox provided and type an appropriate name for what you are creating, like this:

Once you have entered a name for your view, you'll need to decide whether you'd like to assemble a Dashboard or a Story. Along the left-hand side of the page under Select a template, you can scroll vertically through a list of content types that you can use to organize your visualizations:

We'll get much deeper into the process of assembling in the next section of this chapter, but for now, let's select Dashboard (by clicking on the word Dashboard), and then select the Single Page layout (by double-clicking on the highlighted rectangle labeled Freeform).

Watson Analytics will save your new dashboard and the template will be opened with a blank canvas (shown in this screenshot):

Notice the Data set icon (circled in the next screenshot) at the bottom of the canvas. Under the Data set icon, the Data set list icon, the name of the dataset, and the data columns are displayed. The list of data columns is in what is referred to as the Data Tray. If you click on the data set icon, the information below it is hidden. Click on it again and the information reappears:

Using these features, you can add columns to the canvas by:

Besides adding columns of data, you can add visualizations, by clicking on the Visualization icon (shown in the following screenshot) and selecting a visualization type that you want to use:

Moving to the right (from the Visualizations icon), we have additional icons that provide various other options. These are, Text, Media, Webpage, Image and Shapes. Each allows you to add and enhance your dashboard view.

The far-right icon (shown in the next screenshot) is the Properties icon. This icon allows you to change your dashboard's theme and general style. At the time of writing this book, only a few themes and styles are available, but more are planned:

Another option for enhancing your dashboard, should the aforementioned not be sufficient, is to access your Watson Analytics collection by clicking on the collection icon on the far right of the main toolbar shown in the following screenshot and dragging selections from the collection list onto the dashboard canvas:

Finally, if nothing else suits your needs, you can have Watson Analytics create a new visualization based on a question you type in the What do you want to assemble? field, as follows: