VICIdial soundboard Rank and Horz explained

Rank and Horz are the two fields that decide where each button lands on a VICIdial Soundboard. Once you have more than a few entries, these are what turn a random pile of buttons into a board an Agent can navigate without thinking. You set them per entry, so every button, header, and spacer carries its own position, and the board you see is just the sum of all those positions resolved together.

What each field controls

Rank is the vertical order in which an entry is displayed to the agent. Lower-ranked entries sit higher up; higher numbers fall further down the board. Horz is the horizontal order in which an entry is displayed, so it controls left-to-right placement within a row. Together they form a grid coordinate: Rank says which row, Horz says where in that row. You assign both per entry, which means you have full control over the exact position of every button and header, and you set them as plain numbers so the ordering is easy to reason about. Nothing places itself automatically; if two entries share the same numbers you can get an unpredictable order, so give each one its own clear values.

Horz matters most once you move beyond a single stack of buttons, because that is when left-to-right ordering becomes meaningful. On a simple top-down board where every button sits in its own row, Rank does most of the work and Horz has little to resolve. The moment you put two buttons on the same row, though, Horz decides which one is on the left, so the two fields together let you describe any grid position you want. For the surrounding fields that shape the same board, the agent screen configuration guide covers the rest of the screen.

How Rank and Horz place a button

flowchart TD
  A[Soundboard entry] --> B[Read Rank value]
  A --> C[Read Horz value]
  B --> D[Rank sets the vertical row position]
  C --> E[Horz sets the horizontal slot in the row]
  D --> F[Button placed on the board]
  E --> F

The diagram shows the two fields acting as a coordinate pair. Rank picks the row from top to bottom, Horz picks the position within that row from left to right, and the button lands at the intersection of the two. Reading them in that order, vertical first then horizontal, makes it easy to predict where any entry will appear before you ever load the board.

A common gotcha

The most frequent mix-up is expecting Horz to spread buttons sideways on a plain top-down board where the layout is really just stacking rows. How Rank and Horz read depends on the layout you chose, so the same numbers look different on a columns board than on a default one. Read soundboard layout options first, then set Rank and Horz to match the shape you picked. A practical habit: leave gaps in your numbering, like 10, 20, 30, so you can slide a new button in between two existing ones later without renumbering the whole board. It saves a lot of tedious editing as the board grows. The finished grid renders inside an Agent script, so always preview it at the agent's screen width to confirm rows and columns fall where you expect rather than where they looked on your admin monitor.

If hand-placing every button sounds tedious, a managed VICIdial can ship with boards already laid out. See VICIfast pricing to get there faster.