Sometimes I am incredibly stupid. But today I just can't figure out how to centre a dashboard in the browser window.

Take this silly example of dashboard created with an infographic template. (Picture below). That blue rectangle is the full width of the dashboard. The dashboard is hard left aligned in the browser window. Typically web sites will centre page content with equal padding on the left and right. I just want the dashboard centred - what am I missing! For some reason the zoom controls of 50%, 75% centre the content. But the other zooms just left align it.

In case I am not missing anything obvious - yes I could make the dashboard wider in pixels. and then centre my content on the wider dashboard. But I don't want to author the dashboard perfectly for my screen. I want it perfect on any screen. 

Hi Marc,
when you create a dashboard with "Infrographic" layout from scratch, the layout positioning is set to "Relative". The canvas is positioned in the center of the screen.  If it's set to "absolute" the canvas aligns to the left edge of the screen.

Can you give it a try?

Sorry, I forgot to add that in my original post. For this dashboard I want absolute layout.

In relative the dashboard is always centred.

In absolute, depending on the level of the zoom control, sometimes it's centred and other times it's left aligned - with no obvious reason. Who would ever want it left aligned!

OK, got it. Unfortunately, I have no solution for that nasty habit but am aware of it. I assume that there's a percentage margin/padding applied on the canvas depending on the zoom level and screen resolution. Must be something hard coded by IBM devs.

I think the dashboard documentation needs to bit of a rewrite. It doesn't look like it was updated to think about the zoom control.

From the help text:

This is no longer true, given Absolute has the zoom control.

Now that absolute has a zoom control, I am now scratching my head over why bother with relative. You can do relative fit to page, how is that different to Absolute zoomed at fit to page. And why on earth would I ever want relative, not fit to page. Is relative fit to page, fit all of it on the page, whilst relative not fit to page just the width? And how would that be any different to absolute zoomed fit to width.

Regardless of which canvas setting, all objects still have the responsive option, so it isn't anything to do with that.

How can such a simple task of setting up a canvas be so difficult! When I create a powerpoint slide I never worry about this - why do I need to with a dashboard?

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Marc Reed
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https://community.ibm.com/community/user/businessanalytics/blogs/marc-reed/2023/11/28/cognos-dashboards-absolute-and-relative-fit-to-pag