Exploring Catalog Data

Once you've created a catalog and attached it to a project, what comes next? In this quick tutorial I'll show you a few key ways to actually start exploring the data and putting it to use. The easiest way to dive into your catalog is through explore. From your project click explore and you'll enter a familiar visualization environment. In this explorer environment you can choose to work with visuals or tables. On the right you see your catalog and datasets. You can change dataset clicking on this drop down underneath dataset, and each of these objects down here reviews. If you're not sure where the field is that you're looking for, you can use this handy search interface. Clicking on an expandable field will reveal any of the predefined aggregates or time frames that have been set up on your catalog. To add a value to your table of visualization you can either click on the plus next to it or you can drag it. Let's also add the artist's name. If you want to apply filters to your visual, it's just the same as in a typical visualization sitting on a connected database. It's a matter of so I can refine the data in my table. Let's refine it by popularity. And with a single click, I can turn this table into a bar chart. If I want, I can swap it to a different visualization template using this template function here. I can also choose to apply, customizations using our custom visualization menu. When I'm done with my explore session, I have two options. I can either discard it if I was just exploring ad hoc, or I can save it as a new canvas so I can return later, share it, or build on it into a report. Let's save this one as a canvas. I'm now in the canvas I saved on my project. I can see the visualization from my explore session in front of me. Clicking outside of it, I'm able to zoom out. I can turn this into a report. I can add frames. I can bring my teammates in to work collaboratively. The first thing I want to do is give this canvas a good name. From a canvas, you can use low code objects to build with catalog data directly. For example, I can add a table, drop in artist name and best hit, and filter by popularity. I can also easily create visuals without writing SQL. If I want more flexibility, I can also chain SQL cells on top of my catalog tables for advanced analysis. This approach gives both technical and less technical users the flexibility to work in the way they prefer. You can also enter an explore session directly from a canvas. Any cell connected to a catalog can launch Explore. To enter Explore, click on a cell connected to the catalog and then select the Explore cell icon. Here I can tweak the visualization, maybe add a new line for popularity, The key thing here is these changes are isolated. I don't affect the original canvas unless I choose to save my version as a new canvas. I can choose to save this as a new canvas just like we did in a previous explore session if I want to save it or expand on my work to create a report, or I can choose to go back to my canvas where I will see the underlying visual unimpacted. So now you can see the ad hoc querying and changes that I made to my visualization have not been applied to my underlying visual. So whether you're exploring data ad hoc, tweaking existing reports, or building visuals with low code objects, catalogues give you a powerful, flexible way to work with your data.