As long as you're not the very first user in your team's Metabase, the easiest way to start exploring your data is by looking at dashboards, charts, and lists that your teammates have already created. The best place to start is by checking out any dashboards that might be pinned on your home page or in the collections you have access to.
Alternatively, you can dive right in to exploring the data in Metabase by clicking on one of the databases at the bottom of the home page, and then clicking on a table to see it. You can also click on the bolt icon on any table to see an automatic exploration of its data. Give it a try!
Collections in Metabase are a lot like folders. They're where all your team's dashboards and charts are kept. To explore a collection just click on one in the "Our analytics" section of the home page, or click on Browse all items to see everything.
If your teammates are cool, they'll have pinned some important dashboards or questions within your collections; if so, those important or useful items will show up nice and large at the top of a collection. Collections also have a list of any other items that are saved within them, as well as a list of other collections that are saved inside the current one.
Dashboards are simply collections of charts and numbers that you want to be able to refer back to regularly. You can learn more about dashboards here.
If you click on a part of a chart, such as a bar in a bar chart, or a dot on a line chart, you'll see a menu with actions you can take to dive deeper into that result, to branch off from it in a different direction, or to x-ray it to see an automatic exploration the thing you clicked on.
In this example of pie orders by type over time, clicking on a dot on this line chart gives us the ability to:
- Zoom in — i.e., see just the banana cream pie orders in June 2017 over time
- View these Orders — which lets us see a list of banana cream pie orders in June 2017
- Break out by a category — this lets us do things like see the banana cream pie orders in June 2017 broken out by the status of the customer (e.g.,
neworVIP, etc.) or other different aspects of the order. Different charts will have different break out options, such as Location and Time.
Note that charts created with SQL don't currently have these action options.
Other charts as well as table cells will often also allow you to go to a filtered view of that chart or table. You can click on one of the inequality symbols to see that chart where, for example, the value of the Subtotal column is less than $100, or where the Purchased-at timestamp is greater than (i.e., after) April 1, 2017.
Lastly, clicking on the ID of an item in a table gives you the option to go to a detail view for that single record. (E.g., you can click on a customer's ID to see the profile view for that one customer.)
In Metabase parlance, every chart or number on a dashboard is called a "question." Clicking on the title of a question on a dashboard will take you to a detail view of that question. You'll also end up at this detail view if you use one of the actions mentioned above.
When you're looking at the detail view of a question, you can use all the same actions mentioned above. You can also click on the headings of tables to see more options, like viewing the sum of the values in a column, or finding the minimum or maximum value in it.
Additionally, the question detail page has an Explore button in the bottom-right of the screen with options that change depending on the kind of question you're looking at. (Note that the Explore button disappears if your cursor stops moving.)
Here's a list of all the actions:
- Table actions
X-ray thiswill show you an automatic exploration and summary of the data in this table. Learn more about x-raysCount of rows by timelets you see how many rows there were in this table over time.Summarize this segmentgives you options of various summarization functions (sum, average, maximum, etc.) you can use on this table to arrive at a number.
- Chart and pivot table actions
Break outswill be listed depending on the question, and include the option to break out by a category, location, or time. For example, if you're looking at the count of total orders over time, you might be able to further break that out by customer gender, if that information is present.View this as a tabledoes what it says. Every chart has a table behind it that is providing the data for the chart, and this action lets you see that table.View the underlying recordsshows you the un-summarized list of records underlying the chart or number you're currently viewing.X-ray this questionwill show you an automatic x-ray exploration of this question's results.
So what do you do if you can't find an existing dashboard or question that's exactly what you're looking for? Let's learn about asking our own new questions