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This track is for people who analyze data in Lightdash. It walks the explorer journey end to end: find your way around the content your team has already built, run your own explorations, and turn the results into charts and dashboards you can share. Each step below gets you moving, then links to the page that covers it in full. Prefer to learn by doing? Learn has guided walkthroughs for many of these steps, on a sample project you can change freely.

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1. Find what your team has already built

Most questions are already answered by an existing chart or dashboard. Start from the homepage, which surfaces recently viewed and pinned content, and use the search bar to jump straight to a chart, dashboard, or field by name. See search for search filters and grouping, and spaces for how content is organized and shared.

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2. Get to know metrics and dimensions

Every query in Lightdash is built from two kinds of field. Dimensions are the attributes you group and filter by — a country, a date, a customer name. Metrics are the aggregations you measure — a count of orders, a sum of revenue. Your team defines both once so that everyone’s numbers agree. For the full field reference, see dimensions and metrics.

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3. Run your own query

Open a Table and you’re in the Explore view: pick the dimensions and metrics you want, sort the results, and Lightdash writes the SQL for you. From there you can chart the results and save them. See the Explore view for selecting fields, sorting, building a chart, and saving it.

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4. Narrow the results with filters

Filters cut your query down to the rows you care about — one country, last quarter, orders above a threshold. See filtering in the Explore view for where to add them, and the filters reference for every filter type and operator.

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5. Share what you find

Send a colleague a link to exactly what you’re looking at, save a chart into a space so the team can find it later, or download the results. See sharing charts.

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6. Build a dashboard

A dashboard collects charts onto one canvas so a question stays answered. Add saved charts or build new ones inline, arrange them into tabs, and share the result. See dashboards.

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7. Use dashboards other people built

Dashboards aren’t read-only. Filter them to your slice, change the date granularity, click a point to filter the rest of the tiles, and drill into any number to see the rows behind it. See interacting with dashboards.

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Video guides

If you prefer watching over reading, check out the videos below. These use data available in demo.lightdash.com, so you can follow along. The videos are split into chapters, so you can jump to the part you need using the progress bar. The first video covers the fundamentals of Lightdash: dashboards, charts, metrics, dimensions, and how to explore data on your own.
For advanced functionality — custom metrics, table calculations, advanced chart configuration, and more — check out the video below.