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Saving and Restoring Dock Layouts

Standard Time®'s workspace — every open tab, its filter, its settings, and its column arrangement — can be saved as a single named Dock Layout and restored in one click. Administrators can build a standard layout once and assign it to specific users or an entire workgroup.


What Is a Dock Layout?

Every screen you open in Standard Time® — Time Logs, a Gantt chart, Inventory, a specific report — appears as its own tab across the top of the main work area, alongside the Filter, Properties, and Settings panels docked around the edges. A Dock Layout is a named snapshot of that entire arrangement of open tabs: which screens are open, what each one is showing, and how it's filtered and arranged — saved once, under a name, and restored later in a single click.

Flow: arrange your tabs, save the layout by name, it is stored in the database, then Restore Layout reopens every tab exactly as saved
Saved layouts live in the database, not your browser — so a saved layout follows you between computers, and can follow other people too when an administrator shares it.

This is different from Standard Time® simply reopening your last session's tabs automatically. A Dock Layout is a deliberate, named save — you decide when to capture a workspace and what to call it, and it stays available under that name until you (or an administrator, for a shared one) delete it.


Opening the Dock Layout Menu

Right-click in the empty space at the right side of the tab strip — past the last open tab, not on a tab itself — to open the Dock Layout menu.

Dock Layout menu opened by right-clicking the empty space at the right side of the tab strip, showing Save Tab Layout As, Save Tab Layout, Restore Layout, and Edit Tab Layouts
Right-click past the last tab to open the Dock Layout menu — not on an individual tab, which opens that tab's own right-click menu (Close, Duplicate, Rename, …) instead.

The menu includes:

  • Home (All Views) — jump straight to the Home screen tab.
  • Reopen Closed Tab — bring back the most recently closed tab.
  • Save Tab Layout As… — save the current arrangement of every open tab under a new name.
  • Save Tab Layout — a quick save that overwrites the layout you most recently saved or restored this session (grayed out until you've done one of those at least once).
  • Restore Layout… — a submenu listing every saved layout available to you, by name.
  • Edit Tab Layouts — opens the full management grid of every saved layout you can access.
  • Close All Tabs — closes everything and returns to Home.

Saving Your Current Layout

Get your workspace the way you want it — open the tabs you need, filter each one, arrange the grid columns — then save it.

Steps to save a layout:
  1. Arrange your tabs: open every screen you want included, set each one's filter, and arrange its grid columns.
  2. Right-click the empty space at the right side of the tab strip.
  3. Choose Save Tab Layout As…
  4. Type a name and confirm.
Save Layout As dialog prompting for a name for the current dock layout
Names must be distinct — if you type a name that already exists, you're asked whether to overwrite that existing layout instead of creating a duplicate.

Once you've saved a layout this way (or restored one — see below), the plain Save Tab Layout item becomes available. Use it any time you tweak the workspace and want to update that same saved layout without going through the naming prompt again — it silently overwrites whichever layout you most recently saved-as or restored, rather than creating a new one.


What Gets Saved (and What Doesn't)

A layout captures far more than just "which tabs were open." For every tab, it remembers the screen itself, the specific record it was showing, its active filter and settings, and the grid's column layout and widths — plus which tab was selected when you saved. Restoring puts you back exactly where you left off on every tab, not just with the same screens reopened blank.

What a saved layout captures for every open tab versus what stays personal and is never captured
Side panel arrangement (Filter, Properties, Settings pin state and splitter sizes) is deliberately left out of every saved layout — it stays your own personal window arrangement.

That last point matters most when a layout is shared: restoring someone else's shared layout only changes which document tabs are open across the top. It will never pin, unpin, or resize the Filter, Properties, or Settings panels around your own screen — your personal window arrangement is left exactly as it was.


Restoring a Saved Layout

Open the Dock Layout menu (right-click the right side of the tab strip) and hover Restore Layout… to see every layout available to you — your own saved layouts plus anything an administrator has shared with you. Click a name to load it.

Because restoring a layout replaces your current workspace, Standard Time® always confirms first: "Loading '<name>' will close all currently open tabs. Continue?" Confirm, and every currently open tab closes, the saved tabs reopen in the same order with their filters and column layouts intact, and the tab that was active when the layout was saved is reselected automatically.

Toast message confirming a dock layout was restored, showing the number of tabs reopened
A toast confirms how many tabs were restored. If a screen from the saved layout can no longer be reopened — for example your account's rights changed since the layout was saved — the toast instead warns how many of the total tabs came back.

You can also restore a layout from the Edit Tab Layouts management grid (see below) by right-clicking a row and choosing Load Layout — the same confirmation and toast behavior applies either way.


Sharing Layouts With Other Users

Because saved layouts live in the database, they aren't limited to the person who created them. Open a layout's Properties panel and use the Assign to users field to grant specific people — or an entire workgroup — access to see and restore that layout from their own Dock Layout menu.

Dock Layout Properties panel showing Name, Description, Active, Type, Assign to users, and Folder fields
The same "Assign to users" tool used elsewhere in Standard Time® to share saved records — pick individual users, a workgroup, or both.
An administrator saves a layout, assigns it to specific users or a workgroup in the Properties panel, and those recipients see it in their own Restore Layout menu
Build the layout once, assign it, and it shows up automatically in every assigned person's own Restore Layout… menu.

Visibility rule: a layout with nobody assigned is private — only its creator can see or restore it. The moment it's assigned to at least one user or workgroup, everyone covered by that assignment can see it in their own Restore Layout… menu and Edit Tab Layouts grid too. Assigning it doesn't hand over ownership, though — rename and delete stay restricted to the original creator no matter how widely a layout is shared.


Managing Saved Layouts

Choose Edit Tab Layouts from the Dock Layout menu to open the full management grid — every layout you have access to, grouped first by Type (full multi-tab layouts, listed separately from any single-tab saves) and then by folder.

Dock Layouts management grid showing both active and inactive saved layout records
Inactive layouts stay listed in this grid but drop out of everyone's Restore Layout… menu — useful for retiring an outdated layout without deleting the record outright.

Right-click any row for its own context menu: Properties, Rename, Delete, Duplicate, and Load Layout. A few things to know:

  • Active — uncheck this in the Properties panel to hide a layout from the Restore Layout… menu without deleting the record. It stays in this grid, ready to switch back on.
  • Rename / Delete — restricted to the layout's original creator, even for a layout that's been shared with an entire workgroup.
  • Duplicate — makes an independent copy owned by whoever duplicates it; the copy starts with no sharing assignments of its own, even if the original was shared.
  • Folder — organize layouts into folders the same way you'd organize projects, for teams that build up more than a handful of saved layouts.

Ideas for Shared Layouts

Because a layout can be assigned to a workgroup, it's a practical way for an administrator to standardize a workspace for an entire role — without asking every person to build it themselves.

Layout Assigned to
Shop Floor Scan Station A workgroup covering a shared scanning terminal — opens straight to Scan Barcodes, pre-filtered to that station's active jobs.
Month-End Reporting The Accounting workgroup — Time Logs and Expenses filtered to last month, plus a Full Job Cost report tab, all arranged and ready.
Project Manager Home Every project manager — Gantt chart, Resource Allocation, and Project Tasks tabs pre-arranged with the columns each PM actually uses.
New Hire Onboarding A simplified layout — just Timesheet and Time Off — assigned to a new employee so their very first login isn't cluttered with tabs they don't need yet.

Each of these starts the same way: one person builds the workspace, saves it under a clear name, and assigns it to the right workgroup. Everyone else just picks it from their own Restore Layout… menu.


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