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The Home Page

Learn how to navigate the mySidewalk home page

Jennifer Funk avatar
Written by Jennifer Funk
Updated over 2 weeks ago

The mySidewalk Home centralizes access to the most critical tools for your data storytelling workflow. From here, you’re just one click away from finding the data you need, discovering valuable insights, and telling your community’s story.

There are four sections to the Homepage:

  1. The top section - Get data for your community - features tools to access data

  2. The middle section - Find insights features tools to create visualizations

  3. The bottom section - Tell a story features tools to publish your stories

  4. The Sidebar features quick access to core product areas

1. Get data for your community

The top section lets you start a new search right away. If you know what you're looking for, search by keyword; if you'd like suggestions, check out our data guides.

Data search: Search mySidewalk's comprehensive library of more than 4 billion data points by keyword. You can also filter by source, time element, and geography.

Data guides: Explore one of mySidewalk's topically curated data guides and select data based on recommendations from our team and partners.

2. Find insights

The middle section lets you quickly view interactive visualizations so you can begin interpreting your data and discovering actionable insights.

Explore a Map opens an interactive map to help you identify and understand spatial patterns in your data; learn more about how to interact with the map here.

Review Trends opens trend graphs for up to 100 regions at a time and allows you to calculate changes for a customizable time range; learn more here.

Discover Relationships opens up a correlation matrix to reveal the strength of relationships between all of your selected variables; learn how correlations work here.

Analyze Distribution shows you how your selected regions rank against each other for a particular indicator and the shape of the data across regions; learn more here.

*Note that you must select regions and data before viewing a visualization. If you haven't done so yet, you'll be asked to make your selections before continuing.

3. Tell a story

The third section features different tools for telling your data stories.

From Scratch opens up a blank Report and you can start adding your own content

From a Template opens up a searchable list of pre-made Report Templates on a variety of topics, including housing, food access, and more; learn about templates here.

Pick up where you left off is list of recent Reports and Dashboards that you and/or your team have been working on; for the full list, use the Quick Access menu in the sidebar.

4. The sidebar

The left sidebar features access to core product areas and tools for managing the data and you and your team create or upload into your mySidewalk account.

Quick Access

  • Seek - the product area for data search, exploration, and insights discovery

  • Reports - create and share a report from scratch or a template; edit existing reports

  • Dashboards - create and share a dashboard; edit an existing dashboard

  • Folders - create and manage folders, which contain Reports and Dashboards

Your Team's Data

  • Layers - view and manage data layers your team has created and/or uploaded

  • Upload data - upload your own data to mySidewalk

  • Draw a boundary - create a custom boundary to use in your analysis and storytelling

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