From Ad Hoc Analysis to Polished Reports

Count metrics and our built in templates make it faster and easier than ever to build a dashboard or report, especially for low code users. To get started, open a project like the one I have here. Make sure it has catalogs attached. Then click on explore to open an explore session. From here, just navigate to the dataset you want and start building. For example, let's create a line chart to show the total number of streams over time. Because catalogs define preset aggregations and time frames, this step is much easier for end users. Once you're happy with your Explore, you can save it as a canvas by clicking save as canvas. Let's give our canvas a clear name so that users understand exactly what it's for. Now let's visualize streams by artist. I'll use a circle chart mapping total streams to size and artist to color. To add a visual to the canvas, click on the visual icon in the tool tray. Select the template you want to use and add your data. When you use fields to define color or size of a visual like in this one, legends will be automatically generated. In this case, I don't need the sizing legend so I can hide it by right clicking on the legend. Now let's set a bar chart to show the number of artists per genre colored by average popularity. When you use a continuous field like popularity for formatting, count will automatically apply a continuous color scheme. To change it, just click on the three dots and pick from the palette. You can even adjust the number of steps in the palette to create ranges like small, medium, and large. You can sort tables and charts by clicking access labels. Once for descending, twice for ascending, and a third time to reset. I'd like to sort descending. Let's add a pivot table. I'll show average rank per artist broken out by year. You can sort pivot tables by any column using a three dot menu. For example, I'll sort artists by total streams so the most popular artists appear at the top. Null records can be removed using a filter. Finally, let's create a metric card to display the total number of streams across all artists and all time. Now that we've created some visuals and performed some analysis we can convert this into a ready to share report using the built in templates. To select the built in template, open the sidebar and click on add template. You'll see our built in templates, which are available to everyone. Depending on your plan, you may also see custom templates. These are great for applying your own branding or creating layout specific to your organization. In the presentation layout section, you'll find more traditional dashboard styles. You can preview any of them to check which best fits your use case. I like this one so I'll click use template. That imports the template directly into the canvas that I'm working in. Our presentation layout templates come with visual grids ready to snap in your visuals. To add a visual to the template, just click on one of the visuals that you've created, drag it over to the grid, and release it to snap to size. It will automatically update its size and its dimensions to fit into the template. Let's add the rest of our visuals into this template. Now all we have to do is adjust our titles and our descriptions to fit the data that we have prepared. If you like, you can populate these additional detail fields with your own data or you can remove them. Once my cells are in the dashboard, it's a good idea to give each of them a memorable name so that as I'm referring to them later, I'll know which one I'm referring to. Adding a control cell to your report is as simple as clicking on the control cell icon in the tool tray. I'm going to use a multiple select. You can place it anywhere within the dashboard or you can even have it outside the dashboard elsewhere in the canvas. Let's give our control cell a sensible name and a title. Now you can choose the source that you'd like the control cell to be based on. Because I have multiple visuals in my dashboard that all want to use this filter, it will be faster to use the automatic reference. To do that, select your control cell and click on the plus sign next to automatic references. This will automatically generate that reference, and as you can see, it's applied itself already to all my visualizations. The reason that we're seeing nulls and empty charts here is because I haven't selected any artists yet. It's good practice to scope your automatic references specifically to the frames that you'd like them to apply to. This means that the reference won't impact any of the visualizations that I'm building in the canvas outside this frame. Where you add control cells to your dashboard, you'll see by default these connector lines appearing. You can keep them in place or you can choose to hide connector lines by clicking on the frame and navigating over to the design pane here where you see this hide cell connectors. The final thing I want to do is create the overview for my presentation. I can add a heading using the heading command. Plain text is as simple as just typing what you'd like to appear as plain text. If you'd like to include controls into your report, hit the forward slash and then select control. This will give you a drop down from which you can select the control cells you want to include. And this is where it's really useful to have those clear names defined so you can easily see which control cell is which. Once you have a control cell in your overview, it's completely up to you, but I like to remove the control cell from the frame so that there's no confusion with my end users about which control cell they should use. With the dashboard complete, I can jump straight into present mode to show it to an audience. Viewers can interact with the control cell here. They can adjust the zoom to see the full dashboard on one page, or they can zoom in to get more detail on a specific visualization. Hovering the mouse over the visualization will allow them to see tooltips displaying the underlying data, and you can click to pin that tooltip if you would like to take a screenshot or copy one of the values. And viewers can leave comments anywhere they like on the dashboard. They can even tag specific users with mentions. This makes collaboration seamless. Feedback stays directly connected to the data. I'm able to reply to comments directly in this presentation view if I like, or I can resolve them after I've made some changes back in the canvas. And there you have it. In just a few minutes, I created a complete dashboard. I added filters. I enabled collaboration, and I prepared it for presentation. Once you get comfortable with count templates, you'll move from ad hoc analysis to presentation ready dashboards quickly and confidently.