The Layout Editor is an incredibly powerful tool in the creation of both analysis and publication graphics.  It is designed to create "layouts" which can contain one or more graphical objects, which include rectangles, lines, text and graphs.  It works like a page layout program, but the graphs are live and will recalculate with any change in the data or gating.  The page describing the Layout Editor explains the tool palette, commands and options associated with the editor.

The Layout Editor knows how to iterate, that is, to create the same layout for many different samples.  It can iterate over every sample in a group, or via "Panels" where graphs from different samples are combined in a single layout.

Iterated layouts, or stacks are displayed in a special "stack viewer" window.  You may view stacks, either as Tiled Frames, where the frames are laid out on a two dimensional grid, or as Animated Frames, where time is used as the third analytical dimension, and the frames are played as a movie.  The stack viewer can save, print or export the frames, as well as save them in HTML for export to the web.

Because a layout contain many different graphs,and therefore can take a long time to generate, FlowJo supports placeholders to make the editor more  responsive while creating the layouts.

The best explanation is to walk through a simple example of using a layout to check the applicability of a gate across a folder full of samples.  A more involved example is taken from the FlowJo tutorial.

See Also:  Workspace, Table Editor, Groups