Using Dashboards

Overview

Dashboards let you build interactive views over data from any project or workspace you have access to. A single dashboard can combine tables from multiple projects, mix visualizations with raw exploration, and serve both standing reports and ad-hoc analysis. Dashboards scale from small reference tables to billion-row datasets without configuration changes.

Dashboard Accounts

Your dashboard account is set up for you the first time you open a dashboard from PlaidCloud, so there is nothing to create by hand. What you can see follows from your PlaidCloud workspace membership and security groups.

Note

Add, change, and remove people in PlaidCloud rather than inside the dashboard service — see Managing Workspace Members. Creating a user account directly in the dashboard service is an administrator-only action, and an account made that way is not connected to your workspace membership.

Which Dashboards You See

The dashboard list in PlaidCloud shows the published dashboards belonging to the projects you can access. That is the usual case and covers nearly every dashboard.

A dashboard’s owners and workspace admins can limit it to particular security groups. A restricted dashboard is listed only for members of those groups, along with its owners and workspace admins, who see every dashboard. A dashboard with no restriction is listed to everyone with access to its projects, so restricting one dashboard never changes who sees the others.

Two things are worth knowing if a dashboard is missing from your list:

• A restricted dashboard is hidden from the list, not just from opening it. If you can access the dashboard’s project and open its link, you’ll see a Request access page; otherwise ask the owner rather than assuming it was deleted.
• Your dashboard account has to exist for a restricted dashboard to reach you. It is created for you the first time you open a dashboard from PlaidCloud, and your groups are applied then.

Note

Set who can see a dashboard in PlaidCloud with Who can see this? — see Control Who Can See a Dashboard. Project access still applies on top: seeing a dashboard never gives you data from a project you cannot reach.

Display Controls

A display control is a filter bar control that lets anyone viewing a dashboard change what a chart is grouped by — swapping “Region” for “Product Line,” for example — without opening the chart to edit it. A dashboard editor adds and configures display controls from the filter bar’s settings menu: choose Add or edit filters and controls, then Add display control from the New menu.

Limiting Which Columns Appear

By default, a display control’s dropdown lists every column on the underlying dataset marked Is filterable. On a wide dataset that can mean hundreds of columns to scroll through to find the one you want.

Every display control now has its own Available columns field in its configuration panel. Set it to a specific list of columns and the control’s dropdown offers only those columns. Leave it empty and the control behaves exactly as before, offering every filterable column — no dashboard needs any changes to keep working as it always has.

To limit a display control:

1. Open Add or edit filters and controls from the filter bar’s settings menu.
2. Select the display control you want to limit, or add a new one.
3. In Available columns, search for and select the columns you want viewers to see.
4. Save.

How This Interacts with “Is Filterable”

Available columns only ever offers columns already marked Is filterable on the dataset — it narrows that list further, it doesn’t reach around it. Unchecking Is filterable on a column still removes it everywhere: from Available columns, from adhoc filters, from native filters, and from the Simple Metric picker on every chart built against that dataset.

That wide reach is exactly why Available columns exists. Before it, the only way to shorten a display control’s dropdown was to uncheck Is filterable on the columns you didn’t want offered there — which also hid those same columns from every chart’s metric picker on that dataset. Leave Is filterable checked on every column a chart might need as a metric or an adhoc filter, and use each display control’s own Available columns to decide what that control shows in its Group By dropdown.

Caution

Renaming or deleting a column that’s on a display control’s Available columns list isn’t caught automatically — the control just offers fewer columns the next time it’s opened, with no warning. Revisit Available columns on your display controls after renaming or removing dataset columns.

Where It’s Saved

Available columns is saved per display control, along with the rest of that control’s settings. It travels with the dashboard through export and import, and it has no effect on any other control — on the same dashboard or any other dashboard built from the same dataset.

Editing a Table

The message you receive after creating a new table also directs you to edit the table configuration. While there are more advanced features to edit the configuration, we will start with a limited and more simple portion. To edit table configuration:

1. Click on the edit icon of the desired table
2. Click the “List Columns” tab
3. Arrange the columns as desired
4. Click “Save”

This allows you to define the way you want to use specific columns of your table when exploring your data.

• Groupable: If you want users to group metrics by a specific field
• Filterable: If you need to filter on a specific field
• Count Distinct: If you want to get the distinct count of this field
• Sum: If this is a metric you want to sum
• Min: If this is a metric you want to gather basic summary statistics for
• Max: If this is a metric you want to gather basic summary statistics for
• Is temporal: This should be checked for any date or time fields

Exploring Your Data

To start exploring your data, simply click on the desired table. By default, you’ll be presented with a Table View.

Getting a Data Count

To get a the count of all your records in the table:

1. Change the filter to “Since”

2. Enter the desired since filter

   • You can use simple phrases such as “3 years ago”

3. Enter the desired until filter

   • The upper limit for time defaults is “now”

4. Select the “Group By” header

5. Type “Count” into the metrics section

6. Select “COUNT(*)”

7. Click the “Query” button

You should then see your results in the table.

If you want to find the count of a specific field or restriction:

1. Type in the desired restriction(s) in the “Group By” field
2. Run the query

Note

When using “measurement” in a restriction it will refer to the value of the measurement taken which depends on the type of measurement. Therefore you should ensure the measurement types are the same under the “filter section (e.g. weather_description and Maximum temperature.)”

Restricting Result Number

If you only need a certain number of results, such as the top 10:

1. Select “Options”
2. Type in the desired max result count in the “Row Limit” section
3. Click “Query”

Additional Visualization Tools

To expand abbreviated values to their full length:

1. Select “Edit Table Config”
2. Click “List Sql Metric”
3. Click “Edit Metric”
4. Click “D3Format”

To edit the unit of measurement:

1. Select “Edit Table Config”
2. Click “List Sql Metric”
3. Click “Edit Metric”
4. Click “SQL Expression”

To change the chart type:

1. Scroll to “Chart Options”
2. Fill in the required fields
3. Click “Query”

From here you are able to set axis labels, margins, ticks, etc.