Skip to content
Snippets Groups Projects
05-sharing-answers.md 7.9 KiB
Newer Older
  • Learn to ignore specific revisions
  • ## Sharing Your Questions and Answers
    
    ### How to Save a Question
    
    Whenever you’ve arrived at an answer that you want to save for later, click the **SAVE** button in the top right of the screen. This will also save the visualization option you’ve chosen for your answer.
    
    
    ![savebutton](images/SaveButton.png)
    
    
    A pop-up box will appear, you to give your question a name and a description. We suggest phrasing the names for your questions in the form of a question, such as, “How many customers did we have last month?” After saving your question, you'll be asked if you want to add it to a dashboard.
    
    Now, whenever you want to refer to your question again, you can find it in the saved questions list by clicking on the **Questions** link from the main navigation. To edit your question, go to it and click the pencil icon in the top-right.
    
    ### Organizing and Finding your Saved Questions
    
    
    After your team has been using Metabase for a while, you’ll probably end up with lots of saved questions. The Questions page has several tools that’ll help you organize things and find what you’re looking for.
    
    ![Questions](images/saved-questions.png)
    
    #### Shortcuts
    In the top left, you’ll find shortcuts to your favorite questions (mark a question as a favorite by clicking on the star icon that appears on the far right when you hover over it), questions you’ve recently viewed, questions that you’ve saved personally, and popular questions that are used the most by your team.
    
    #### Search
    You can search for a question by typing keywords into the **Search for a question** area.
    
    #### Labels
    One great way to organize your questions is to label them. Create and organize your team’s labels by clicking on the **Labels** heading in the left menu on the Questions page. To create a label, just choose a color (or emoji!) for it, give it a name, and click **Create Label**. You can edit or delete a label by hovering of a label and clicking the **Edit** or **X** icon. You can create labels that pertain to different teams, projects, products, reports, dashboards, or whatever you want!
    
    You can assign as many labels as you want to your questions. Just hover over a question in your list and click the label icon, then pick the label(s) you want to apply to the question.
    
    ![Actions](images/question-actions.png)
    
    If you have several questions that you want to give the same label to, just click the checkbox on the left side of each question’s title when you hover over it to select your questions, then click the Labels dropdown at the top of the page.
    
    ![Checkbox](images/question-checkbox.png)
    
    Once you’ve created a label, it’ll appear in the list on the left side of the screen. Clicking on a label, either in the list of labels or on an individual question, will show you all the questions that have that label.
    
    #### Archiving
    Sometimes questions outlive their usefulness and need to be sent to Question Heaven. To archive a question, just click on the box icon that appears on the far right when you hover over a question. You can also archive multiple questions the same way you apply labels to multiple questions.
    
    If you have second thoughts and want to bring an archived question back, you can see all your archived questions from the **Archive** link at the bottom of the left menu. To unarchive a question, hover over it and click the box icon that appears on the far right.
    
    A **dashboard** is a collection of saved questions that you want to refer back to and view regularly. It displays groups of questions and their corresponding answers.
    
    Questions on a dashboard are meant to be viewed together, so they’re usually grouped by some kind of theme or topic, like Users, Inventory, or Reservations. A reservations dashboard could show the number of reservations by day of week, time of day, geographical region, and more.
    
    Have a few key performance indicators that you want to be able to easily check? Make a dashboard featuring questions that show your key metrics and share it with your team.
    
    You can make as many dashboards as you want. Go nuts.
    
    ### How to Create a Dashboard
    Once you have a question saved, you can create a dashboard. Click the **Dashboards** dropdown at the top of the screen, then **Create a new dashboard**. Give your new dashboard a name and a description, then click **Create**, and you’ll be taken to your shiny new dashboard. You can always get to your dashboards from the dropdown at the very top of the screen.
    
    Kyle Doherty's avatar
    Kyle Doherty committed
    ![Create Dashboard](images/dashboards/DashboardCreate.png)
    
    
    ### Adding saved questions to a dashboard
    
    You can add a newly saved question to a dashboard directly from the window that pops up after you save the question, or by clicking the Add to Dashboard icon in the top-right of a question page. You can also go to one of your dashboards and click the plus icon in the top right to add any of your saved questions to the dashboard.
    
    Once you add a question to your dashboard, it’ll look something like this:
    
    Kyle Doherty's avatar
    Kyle Doherty committed
    ![First Dashboard](images/dashboards/FirstDashboard.png)
    
    ### Arranging cards
    Each question on a dashboard is in its own card that you can move around or resize as you see fit; just click the edit icon that looks like a pencil in the top-right of the dashboard screen.  
    
    Kyle Doherty's avatar
    Kyle Doherty committed
    Once you're in edit mode you'll see a grid appear. You can move and resize the cards in the dashboard to your liking and they'll snap to the grid.
    
    Kyle Doherty's avatar
    Kyle Doherty committed
    ![Editing dashboard](images/dashboards/DashboardEdit.png)
    
    
    - To move cards just click and drag.
    - To resize a card just click and drag the handle at the bottom right corner of the card.
    - To remove a card, click the X icon in the top right corner.
    
    Questions in your dashboard will automatically update their display based on the size you choose to make sure your data looks great at any size.
    
    ## Deleting a dashboard
    Deleting a dashboard does not delete the individual saved questions on it — it just deletes the dashboard. Remember — dashboards are shared by everyone on your team, so think twice before you delete something that someone else might be using!
    
    To delete a dashboard, click the pencil-looking **Edit** icon in the top right of the dashboard, then click **Delete**.
    
    Kyle Doherty's avatar
    Kyle Doherty committed
    ## Fullscreen dashboards
    
    
    Kyle Doherty's avatar
    Kyle Doherty committed
    After you've made your ideal dashboard you may want to put it on a TV or present it in some other visible space to help keep your team up-to-date throughout the day.
    
    Kyle Doherty's avatar
    Kyle Doherty committed
    
    To enter fullscreen mode just click the fullscreen icon in the top right of the dashboard.
    
    
    Kyle Doherty's avatar
    Kyle Doherty committed
    Once you've entered fullscreen mode you can also switch the dashboard into "Night mode" for higher contrast.
    
    Kyle Doherty's avatar
    Kyle Doherty committed
    
    ![Night mode](images/dashboards/DashboardNightMode.png)
    
    ## Auto refresh
    If your data is more realtime in nature you can set your dashboard up to auto refresh.
    
    
    Allen Gilliland's avatar
    Allen Gilliland committed
    ![Autorefresh](images/dashboards/DashboardAutorefresh.png)
    
    Kyle Doherty's avatar
    Kyle Doherty committed
    
    You can set your dashboard to update in 1, 5, 10, 15, 30, and 60 minute intervals depending on how fresh you need the data to be.
    
    Enabling auto refresh will re-run all the queries on the dashboard at the interval you choose, so keep the size of the dashboard and the complexity of the questions in mind when setting up auto refresh.
    
    Combining fullscreen mode and auto refresh is a great way to keep your team in sync with your data throughout the day.
    
    
    ## Configuring dashboard using URL
    
    It is possible to amend URL of the dashboard to automatically enter fullscreen, enable night mode or autorefresh the dashboard. This allows you to configure the dashboard even when you do not have any input access to the device where dashboard will be displayed, for example, scripted screens.
    
    To configure dashboard using URL address, you can append it with hash keys like `fullscreen`, `night`, or `refresh`. Consider this example:
    
    `https://metabase.mydomain.com/dash/2#refresh=60&fullscreen&night`
    
    This URL will make dashboard enter night mode, fullscreen and refresh every 60 seconds.
    
    
    Next, we'll offer up some suggestions on how to create useful dashboards, in our [Tips on Dashboards](06-dashboard-tips.md).