Dashboard: Progress Bar

Here’s the very common kind of dashboard note: the summary note. It goes out and collects information from a bunch of other notes, and consolidates the result in one place.

Here, we want to add up the word count for some notes — the notes we’re writing — while ignoring the word counts of our grocery lists, deadlines, letters to publishers, and whatnot. In my hypothetical case, the Things We're Writing are all kept somewhere inside a container called BOOK. So, so find our current word count, we just add up the wordcounts of all the notes inside BOOK:

"Rule: Text=sum_if(descendant(/BOOK),1,$WordCount);)

Now, suppose we’ve got a milestone or target – say 65,000 words. A progress bar might help use see how far along we’ve come:

This lets us see at a glance how far along we are, and also gives us the raw data.

Exercises for the reader:

• Use the hue() or brightness() functions to adjust MapBodyTextColor so that the text becomes greener the more we’re ahead of schedule, and redder the more we fall behind.
• Use the dropshadow to pack even more information into the single summary note. What else might you compute here, and why?