Teams: Control who can access which visualizations

Teams let you collaborate & share visualizations with others within one workspace, be it within a company, on a course at university or when working with clients on a website.

Every visualization created in a team can be seen by all other members of that team – but only by those. Teams are perfect to control who can access which visualizations: For example, only one department in your organization can see and edit certain visualizations when you create a team for those visualizations and invite only the relevant people.

Contents

1. Organization of and within teams
2. Invitations, private and public teams
3. Team options
4. How to use teams

Organization of and within teams

People in your workspace can be in as many teams as you like them to be.

When they click on Archive at the top, they will see all the teams they're part of. Everyone in a team can create as many folders as needed to organize visualizations.

Teams can have an unlimited number of folders and sub-folders. Here's an example for a team ("Print reports") with three folders and some sub-folders. This user is also in three other teams: Breaking News, Climate change, and Training.

Invitations, private and public teams

In general, people need to be invited by a workspace manager or admin or team manager to join a team. Learn more about how to add new people to a team here.

But when you create public teams, certain people in your workspace can also join them on their own. Here's how that works:

When you create a team, you have the choice to make it private or public. People can see them depending on their workspace role:

Private teams can only be joined by workspace members and guests who are invited to them. (Workspace managers and admins can see all teams, so they can also see the private teams.)

Public teams can be browsed and joined by your workspace members. Below the list of teams in their Archive, they will see an All teams drop down with all the public teams they're not part yet. When they click on one of the teams, they can join it:

Workspace guests won't even be able to see those public teams. They can only become part of a team by being invited by a workspace manager or admin, or a team manager.

Team options

Datawrapper teams come with some powerful options. You can

• show a Slack or Microsoft Teams notification every time somebody in your team creates or publishes a visualization
• set a default folder (like “first draft”) for the visualizations created within the team
• create a custom embed code to define the height, width, border etc.

How to use teams

Let’s see how you can make use of this all before looking at some practical questions you might have:

Here are four ideas on how to use team folders.

• Help & supervise. Datawrapper's simplicity makes it a great charting & mapping tool for data vis newbies in your organization. But especially in the beginning, they will need some help. Shared folders enable your in-house graphics team to quickly check what’s being produced by the rest of the company, to make sure everything is up to standard.
• Create workflows. To know where things are at when collaborating with coworkers, set up subfolders for steps of the process like “Draft”, “Fact-Check” and “Published”. If your coworker has a Kindergarten emergency an hour before publishing the report, you can take over and make the last changes to their chart.
• Work with clients. Invite your clients to make the last changes to charts, maps & tables you’re researching and designing for them, before you hit the Publish button – or simply share your progress. Learn more about read-only guests here.
• Teach. When teaching data visualization, Datawrapper’s teams enable you to have an overview of all of the students’ exercises and assignments. Create a new team for each class and invite your students, then create a new folder for each assignment and let your students move their submissions there. You can check their data, sources and chart design choices directly in the app.

If you have any more questions, please let us know with an email to support@datawrapper.de. Also, if you’re using the teams feature in a way that might be interesting for other readers of this blog, get in touch with us, too. We’d love to write about it.