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This is where you consume your semantic layer day to day: run queries, build charts and dashboards, and share results with your team. You’ll find every chart type, filters and table calculations for shaping results, and the metrics catalog for browsing what’s available to query. Spaces keep your saved charts and dashboards organized, while alerts and scheduled deliveries push results to you and your team automatically, in Lightdash or over email and Slack.

Configure your charts

Learn about the configuration options available for most chart types in Lightdash.

Custom tooltips

Using Filters

Filters appear at the top of the Explore view or dashboard and allow users to change the data being pulled into your charts.

Filters reference

Filters appear at the top of the Explore view and allow users to change the data being pulled in.

How to filter a dashboard in the URL

Date zoom

Change the time granularity of charts on your dashboard without editing them

Formatting your fields

Using custom fields

The fields that you see in your `dimensions` and `metrics` are created by the people maintaining your Lightdash project. But, you can create new custom dimensions or metrics for quick calculations and binning on the fly. On this page, we'll explain what custom dimensions and metrics are and how to use them.

How to do period-over-period analysis in Lightdash

Learn how to do period-over-period analysis in Lightdash with examples and best practices.

Planning your dashboard: the Who, What and How of building great dashboards.

For those of you who are just getting started with building dashboards, it it can be useful to do some planning before you get your hands dirty and actually start building the thing.

Scheduled deliveries

Scheduled deliveries let you send a dashboard or saved chart, and their results to people via email or Slack - even to people who don't have an account in your Lightdash instance.

Alerts

Alerts enable you to receive notifications via email or Slack when the value of a saved chart meets your specified conditions.

How to promote content

Promoting content enables you to copy content from one project to another. It's especially useful when working with preview or development projects. You can promote charts created in your development projects to production, so it's easy to test and make changes without the fear of breaking things in production.

Verified charts and dashboards

Mark charts and dashboards as verified so your team can instantly identify trusted, approved content. Verified content gets a green checkmark badge that shows who verified it and when, and verification is automatically removed if someone other than the verifier edits the content.

Version history

Roll back to previous versions of charts and dashboards in Lightdash.

Spaces

Once you've used Lightdash for a while, your team will probably end up with a lot of saved charts and dashboards. Spaces let you organize your saved charts and dashboards.

Default user spaces

Give every eligible user their own personal space in a project, provisioned automatically on their next login.

Pinning

SQL runner

The SQL runner is used to build ad-hoc queries or charts using totally custom SQL.

Keyboard shortcuts

Speed up your workflow with keyboard shortcuts in Lightdash

Chart types

Bar chart

Use bar charts to compare things between different groups or track how a number changes over time.

Line chart

Use line charts to show changes in a number over a short or long period of time.

Area chart

Use area charts to show how values develop over time when the total is as important as its parts.

Mixed chart

Use mixed charts to combine bars, lines, and scatter charts on the same visualization.

Scatter chart

Use scatter charts to look at the relationship or correlation between two variables.

Pie chart

Use pie charts to visualize data that adds up to a meaningful whole.

Funnel chart

Use funnel charts to show pipeline performance, product conversion metrics, or any process with discrete stages.

Treemap chart

Use treemap charts to show parts of a whole using nested rectangles.

Sankey chart

Use Sankey charts to visualize flows between categories, showing how values move from sources to targets.

Table

Use tables for looking at tabular data or lists of things like user IDs or transactions.

Big value

Use big value charts to display a single value prominently.

Gauge

Use gauges to highlight a single value against a qualitative range, like performance against a target.

Map

Use maps to display geographic data on an interactive map.

Custom charts

Custom charts offer additional customization and an extended library of charts. The charts are powered by [vega-lite](https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/examples) - the link will take you to some example galleries of what you can build using this powerful charting library. This includes heat maps, bubble plots, box plots and more.

Table calculations

Table calculations

Table calculations make it easy to create metrics on the fly (for example, aggregating the data in your table over some window, or getting a running total of a column).

Formula table calculations

Build table calculations using a spreadsheet-style formula syntax instead of raw SQL.

SQL templates

7 pages

Metrics catalog

Catalog

Browse, explore, and curate your metrics in the Metrics Catalog.

Saved Trees

Build shareable diagrams that show how your metrics relate to each other, visualize hierarchies, and understand dependencies across your data model.

Drivers

Define which metrics influence each other in your .yml files and visualize those relationships automatically in Saved Trees.