Probably the best way to understand the Layout Editor is to walk through a simple task to see the steps involved in producing a series of graphs to check your data.  In this example, we will create a simple analysis to check the applicability of a light scatter gate across all of the samples in an experiment.

1. Create a new workspace, and populate it with a group of samples.  (Here we show a workspace containing the FlowJo Tutorial's Experiment 1 data.)
2. Create a Lymphocyte gate drawn on Forward Scatter vs. Side Scatter.
3. In the Workspace window, drag the Lymphocyte population onto the group containing all the samples in Experiment 1.
4. Bring up the Layout Editor, by clicking the button in the workspace, by selecting Layout Editor… from the Windows menu, or by typing Cmd-L.
5. Name the current layout:  Lymph Gate Checker
6. Drag a top level sample from the workspace into the canvas of the layout editor.
7. Select Get Info… from the Layout menu or use the shortcut of double clicking the graph.  From there you can edit many of the characteristics of the graph.

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1. To generate this graph for all of the samples in the experiment, click on the button with the stack shown on it.  Depending on your preference settings, FlowJo might generate either the Tiled Frames or the Animated Frames first.  Here we'll discuss the Tiled Frames first, so if Animated Frames in the current view, click on the tab marked Tiled Frames in the top left corner of the window.
2. The tiled view shows all of the graphs laid out on a single large page.  The display will be scaled so that all of the graphs are visible.  You can adjust the window size, the number of columns or the scaling as a way to make the graphs more easily read.  Scan all the graphs to see if the scatter gate correctly surrounds all of the Lymphocyte populations.

3. Alternately, you could click on the Animated Frames, and use the Play button (shown with a right-pointing triangle) or type the space bar to play all the frames in sequence.  Use the left and right arrow keys to manually progress through the sequence.  (To see how this will look, click on the graphic below to view the original QuickTime Movie via the web.  When you are finished, click on "Back" in your Browser window.)

When finished just close the window.  Unless you explicitly save the stack, FlowJo does not ask you if you want to save this window.  All of the information needed to recreate it is stored as part of the workspace file, so you could always recreate the Lymph Gate Checker layout after any data is added to the workspace.

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