Interacting with dashboards

Everything on this page is something a viewer can do to a dashboard without editing it: narrow it with filters, change the time granularity of its charts, filter the whole dashboard by clicking a value in one chart, look at the rows behind a data point, and break a metric out by a dimension.

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Filter the dashboard

Filters sit at the top of a dashboard and change the data in the tiles below. Click a filter to change its value, or click Add filter to add your own — the filters you add yourself are temporary, so nobody else’s view changes. Editors can save filters into the dashboard, require viewers to pick a value before anything loads, and control which tiles each filter reaches. See dashboard filters for all of it.

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Change the date granularity

Date zoom changes the granularity of time-based charts — Day, Week, Month, and so on — without editing them. Editors set up controls that govern every chart at once, or just a chosen subset. See date zoom for creating controls, configuring granularities, and setting defaults.

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Cross-filtering from a chart

Clicking a value in a chart — a bar in a bar chart, say — lets you filter on that value and update every other relevant chart in the dashboard. Filtering a dashboard from one of its own charts is called cross-filtering. Every tile in the dashboard that has the filtered field is filtered to the value you picked. Hover over a tile and then over the funnel icon to see which filter it got. A cross-filter is a temporary filter: it belongs to your session until you save it into the dashboard.

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View underlying data

Click any point on a chart or any cell in a results table and pick View underlying data in the action menu to see the records that make up that number. For example, clicking the bar for a month in a Sales stats per partner, per month chart shows every row in the underlying table that adds up to that month’s total. From there you can export the rows as a CSV, or click Explore from here to open the Explore view with that underlying data as the starting point.

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Choosing which fields appear

By default, underlying data shows every dimension from the table, plus every field from any joined table included in your results. To show a narrower set instead, specify the fields on the metric in your table’s .yml file — see show underlying values in the metrics reference. Those same fields are pre-selected when someone clicks Explore from here from the underlying data table, so they don’t land in an empty results table.

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Drill into a metric

Drilling breaks a metric out by a dimension — total revenue segmented by product type, for example — so you can see where a number came from. Drill into works on metrics only, not on dimensions or table calculations. Take a chart of Sum of basket total per partner, per month, with a conspicuous spike in sales for one partner in May. To find out why, click the data point and then click Drill into in the action menu. Then pick the dimension to segment the metric by. Here that’s Shipping country, to see where the orders came from. Click Open in new tab for a chart of the metric grouped by Shipping country, which shows where the spike came from.