I have seen various post about this in the past, but none seem to end with a solution. I understand the way the tiles move if you need to add a tile, (2 things can’t be at the same place at the same time). I’m wondering if there is a way to “lock” a group of tiles before moving the new tile into its new location. (see example below).
When adding a “thing” tile, it adds to the bottom. (no issue yet)
-Edit the tile style, dimension, icon, etc. (no problem yet)
-Start to move the tile upward to its new location (problem starts)
-Tiles start moving around to make room for the new tile (understandable)
My example below-
If there was a way to “select” a group of tiles, (the group in the red box) and lock them together before moving the new “thing” tile. Then perhaps when dragging the new “thing” upward, the entire group of locked tiles would move downward to make space above them for the new “thing” (green box in my example).
There’s not currently a way to lock an individual ‘group’ of tiles directly, but you could add a spacer tile to the end of the dashboard, adjust it to be the width of the group you want to push down*, then drag that tile into place. At that point, you can remove/edit/add tiles and the rest of the tiles are temporarily locked during that action. That means that if you delete the spacer tile and then immediately add a thing tile, the thing tile will fill the gap that was left by the spacer tile.
*(eg. the 3 full size tile widths… not sure of each of those tiles is a 3x width based on the size of the headers, in which case the temporary tile you create would need to be 9x wide or whatever the size of the headers in that column area)
Here’s a video demonstrating the technique.
In the example above, after I dragged the Spacer Tile into place, I edited it to be 2x wide as I wanted the next tile I added to be to the right a bit. If you wanted it to be in a different position, you could add the tiles you want in your preferred order. For example, if I wanted it centered, I would do:
@Nathaniel_Seror this is the thread I was referring to with some tricks on how tiles are temporarily ‘locked’ while adding/removing items from a dashboard. As long as you don’t drag items around, the tiles will temporarily stay locked during additions and removals.
So here’s a concept of how you could convert individual spacers to large spacers:
(Per our conversation via support, this is a very arbitrary example intentionally kept simple to demonstrate the concept)
And the next big block (same concept, but tap to expand if you're interested in seeing)
Then if you wanted to go the other direction from a single large spacer tile to inserting tiles in between, the concept goes in reverse.
This technique has been working well… here comes the but…
This dashboard is 19 colums wide-
The square tiles are 3 X 3
The rectangular tiles are 1 x 9
The spacer tiles in the center are stacked 1 x 10. This seems to help keep things on the left on the left, and things on the right on the right.
In this example below, I deleted a 3 x 3 tile where Steps Motion is, then immediatly added “Laundry” (outlined in red). It went right where it was supposed to go, but as a 1 x 1. I adjusted the size to 3 x 3 and all was still good. I saved it. Next I needed to change the label to “Laundry”, so back in to edit and changed only the label. When I save it this time, “Laundry” and “Steps Motion” switched places, and “Laundry” is now on the end. (outlined in red).
So why would changing just the label move a tile? This one is minor. Last week I changed a label in an existing tile and saved it. It wrecked the entire dashboard. It took an hour to put things back in place. This has happened a few times now.
A few had suggested grouping or containerizing tiles (similar to super tile, but with benefit with individual tile features) as a request, but not sure if this is easy/feasible. I’ve voted for this in past.
Another option, maybe would be a absolute positional lock option on each tile and the auto-sorting would happen around it. I’ve had the same issue you mentioned, especially if I get too big on tile options on a single dash.
I used to use a program called “FENCES” on a windows computer. It put icons inside and they wouldn’t move. Others moved around them. I’ve been using the wide tile trick suggested by @josh , but that won’t work if all I’m doing is changing something like the label.
