Designing the document or dashboard
Hide unused document sections (by collapsing the section on the template) so that the template is easier to work with. See Hiding and displaying sections.
Use the grouping feature to minimize the amount of data passed between the web server and the browser. This is useful because documents do not use incremental fetch to return data from the server. See Grouping records in a document.
Determine whether the dataset(s) will return a large amount of data. If so, consider adding grouping to the document by choosing which attributes you want to group the pages by. See Grouping records in a document.
Make the following decisions as you are planning the design of your document, not after you are finished:
Determine the logic for page breaks. See Adding page breaks to a document.
Decide what export options you will enable for users of this document. See Exporting a document.
Decide whether you need landscape or vertical orientation to best display the data you want to include. See Modifying page setup options.
If the document will be viewed in PDF, be sure to include bookmarks. See Including bookmarks in PDFs.
Do not include so many graphical objects that the data becomes unimportant. Make sure the data is the main focus of the document. The overall goal is to achieve a clean look.
Plan your design so that all related data can be seen on a single screen or page, and that it can be interpreted from the top left to the bottom right.
Save your document frequently as you design and make formatting changes to it.
While designing your document, preview it in each display mode in which the document will be displayed, to make sure that the document appears as expected in each display mode. For steps to determine which display modes an analyst can use to view the document, see Defining which display modes are available to users.
For additional best practices when designing a dashboard and when using effects and widgets, see Best practices: Designing effective dashboards.