v0.39.0.1 / Users Guide / 06 Sharing Answers

An example of using a public link to share a dashboard, with the Powered by Metabase footer. These public links will include a Powered by Metabase footer, which you can remove with Enterprise embedding. The charts will also have their action menus disabled,. GET /api/dashboard/public. Fetch a list of Dashboards with public UUIDs. These dashboards are publicly-accessible if public sharing is enabled. You must be a superuser to do this. POST /api/dashboard/ Create a new Dashboard. PARAMS: name value must be a non-blank string. Description value may be nil, or if non-nil, value must be a string.

Sharing and organizing 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.

A pop-up box will appear, prompting you to give your question a name and description, and to pick which collection to save it in. Note that your administrator might have set things up so that you’re only allowed to save questions in certain collections, but you can always save things in your Personal Collection. After saving your question, you’ll be asked if you want to add it to a new or existing dashboard.

Now, whenever you want to refer to your question again you can find it by searching for it in the search bar at the top of Metabase, or by navigating to the collection where you saved it. To edit your question, go to it and click the pencil icon in the top-right.

Sharing questions with public links

If your Metabase administrator has enabled public sharing on a saved question or dashboard, you can go to that question or dashboard and click on the sharing icon to find its public links. Public links can be viewed by anyone, even if they don’t have access to Metabase. You can also use the public embedding code to embed your question or dashboard in a simple web page or blog post.

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. Metabase has several ways to help you organize things and find what you’re looking for.

Collections

Collections are the main way to organize questions, as well as dashboards and pulses. Administrators can give you different kinds of access to each collection:

Dashboard
  • View access: you can see the collection and its contents, but you can’t modify anything or put anything new into the collection.
  • Curate access: you can edit, move, or archive the collection and its contents. You can also move or save new things in it and create new collections inside of it, and can also pin items in the collection to the top of the screen. Only administrators can edit permissions for collections, however.
  • No access: you can’t see the collection or its contents. If you have access to a dashboard, but it contains questions that are saved in a collection you don’t have access to, those questions will show a permissions notification instead of the chart or table.

Your personal collection

In addition to the collections you and your teammates have made, you’ll also always have your own personal collection that only you and administrators can see. To find it, click on the “browse all items” button on the homepage and click on “my personal collection” in the list of collections.

You can use your personal collection as a scratch space to put experiments and explorations that you don’t think would be particularly interesting to the rest of your team, or as a work-in-progress space where you can work on things and then move them to a shared place once they’re ready.

Pinned items

In each collection, you can pin important or useful dashboards or questions to make them stick to the top of the screen. Pinned items will also be displayed as large cards to make them stand out well. If you have Curate permissions for a collection, you can pin and un-pin things, and drag and drop pins to change their order.

Any dashboards that are pinned in the main “Our analytics” collection will also show up on the homepage.

Search

Use the search bar to find dashboards, questions, collections, and pulses. You can select from the typeahead’s dropdown results, or hit enter to view a search results page. You can also activate the search bar from anywhere by pressing the / key.

Searches take into account items’ titles, descriptions, and other metadata — you can even search the contents of your SQL queries. For example, you can search for things like SELECT escape_pod FROM mothership and find that one question you worked on six months ago. The results will display an item’s description, which collection it’s saved in, what kind of object it is, and whether it’s pinned. Note that you’ll only ever see items in collections you have permission to view.

Moving

To move a question, dashboard, or pulse into a collection, or from one collection to another, just click and drag it onto the collection where you want it to go. You can also click on the menu to the right of the question and pick the Move action. If you’re trying to move several things at once, click on the items’ icons to select them, then click the Move action that pops up at the bottom of the screen.

Note that you have to have Curate permission for the collection that you’re moving a question into and the collection you’re moving the question out of.

Archiving

Sometimes questions outlive their usefulness and need to be sent to Question Heaven. To archive a question or dashboard, just click on the menu that appears on the far right when you hover over a question and pick the Archive action. You’ll only see that option if you have “curate” permission for the current collection. You can also archive multiple items at once, the same way as you move multiple items. Note that archiving a question removes it from all dashboards or Pulses where it appears, so be careful!

You can also archive collections if you have curate permissions for the collection you’re trying to archive, the collection it’s inside of, as well as any and all collections inside of it. Archiving a collection archives all of its contents as well.

If you have second thoughts and want to bring an archived item back, you can see all your archived questions from the archive; click the menu icon in the top-right of any collection page to get to the archive. To unarchive a question, hover over it and click the unarchive icon that appears on the far right.

Next: creating dashboards

Next, we’ll learn about creating dashboards and adding questions to them.

We know many of you were disappointed by the announcement that Chartio will be going away, and are looking for a new home for your charts and dashboards. So we wanted to provide this brief overview to help you decide if Metabase would be a good replacement for you. The fastest way to get to know Metabase is to download it and try it out, or to start a free Metabase Cloud trial. You can quickly and easily connect to your own data, or just play around the with Sample Dataset included with Metabase.

Before starting: am I in the right place?

Metabase might be the right fit for you if you’re looking for:

  • Embedded analytics and customer-facing reporting. You want to embed charts and dashboards in your own application, host a web portal for your customers’ analytics, or create a white-labeled dashboard for clients.
  • A way to democratize data access to let anyone explore and create charts and dashboards, even if they don’t know how to write SQL.
  • A flexible and open source application that developers and analysts can easily customize and integrate in their workflow.

Free and paid options

Metabase is free and open source. You can host it yourself, or let us handle it on Metabase Cloud. We also have paid tiers with additional features for folks looking either to embed Metabase, or who are looking to manage complex permissions or large numbers of users.

The features

You can also check out our homepage for an overview of our features, or take a Tour of Metabase to get some additional detail.

Supported databases

Amazon Redshift, PostgreSQL, Big Query, Snowflake, MySQL, Mongo, and more: Metabase has a bunch of officially supported databases, as well as a dozen community drivers.

Scalability

Metabase scales well: check out our articles on Metabase at scale, and making dashboards faster.

Reporting

Metabase makes it simple to connect to your data and start asking questions right away. Here are some details on querying, visualizing, and making dashboards.

Querying data and visualizing results

There are two ways to put together a query in Metabase to create a chart. You can use:

  • A graphical query builder that’s simple to pick up, with separate modes for beginners and experts. You can add custom columns and use custom expressions for your filters and aggregations, and even join data, without having to write any SQL.
  • A native editor for SQL, complete with variables, and SQL snippets to let you share and reuse code.

Once you have the results you’re looking for, you’ll have more than 15 different visualizations to choose from, including pivot tables, gauges, time series with trend lines, maps, and numbers with percent changes. Check out our visualizations guide for more details.

Dashboards

A dashboard is way more than a collection of charts in Metabase.

  • You can create interactive dashboards with drill-through capabilities, customizable click behaviors, and cross filtering.
  • Speaking of filters, Metabase lets you add smart filter widgets to your dashboards that allow anyone to explore and modify the SQL-based charts in your dashboard.
  • Keep your team in the loop with dashboard subscriptions to schedule reports via email or Slack. In the Enterprise edition, you can even customize filter values for different recipients.
Metabase Public Dashboard

Sharing and embedding

We’ve already mentioned dashboard subscriptions, but here are some other ways to share what you make in Metabase with others.

Sharing

Sharing a question or dashboard is as simple as sending someone a link (check out our Guide to sharing data). Or, you can always export your results to a CSV, XLSX, or JSON file.

Beyond dashboard subscriptions, you can also set up alerts on questions to send updates when a condition is triggered, like when a metric crosses a threshold.

Embedding

You can embed single charts or entire dashboards in your app. The free open source edition will include a “Powered by Metabase” logo at the bottom of your embeds, while the Enterprise tier removes that attribution and allows you to embed the full Metabase application in your app, letting your customers explore the data on their own. Check out our guide on embedding Metabase in your app to deliver multi-tenant, self-service analytics.

Permissions and auditing

Metabase handles permissions using groups, allowing you to control access to individual databases and tables, or to the collections containing your charts and dashboards.

If you need even more granular control over permissions, the Enterprise Edition includes data sandboxes that allow you to customize access to specific rows and columns in your tables. You can take a look at How to scale self-service analytics for an overview.

Lastly, in the Enterprise Edition, the Auditing tool lets you to track queries, downloads, dashboard views, and more, letting you answer the question “who saw what when?”

Support

Direct support

Metabase Cloud and Enterprise customers enjoy support directly from the Metabase team.

Metabase Public Dashboard Template

Documentation and education

We’ve got you covered here. Metabase is easy to pick up and run with, but it has a lot of depth. We have reference materials in our documentation, and walkthroughs and guides on Learn Metabase.

The Metabase forum

If our docs don’t cover it, check out our discussion forum, which is a treasure trove of tips and problems solved. We even have a few core members of the Metabase team hanging out in there to help the community.

Metabase Public Dashboard Download

Migrating from Chartio

Check out Chartio’s migration guide to learn how to export your data. As for getting those questions into Metabase, you have a couple of options. You can rebuild your queries individually in Metabase using the graphical query builder, or copy and paste them into the SQL editor. That might take a while, though, so if you’re so inclined you can also use the Metabase API to programmatically create queries in Metabase by importing your exported SQL queries. If you want to prioritize things, you can check out your usage stats in Chartio to find your most-used queries, and migrate those first.

Metabase Download

Okay, so this is interesting — what next?

Metabase Training

If you’ve made it this far, it’s probably time to spin up your own Metabase and kick the tires. But if you still have questions, feel free to start a chat with us or use our contact form.