Version v0.12 of Metabase is no longer supported. Check out the docs for the current stable version, Metabase v0.63.

Tips on Creating Helpful Dashboards

To make a really helpful dashboard, you need to first decide what you want the dashboard to tell you about your data. What questions will give you insight into what you want to know? It helps to think of a topic or theme for your dashboard — something like “customer satisfaction,” or “second quarter sales goals,” for example.

Once you’ve decided what kinds of questions your dashboard is going to answer, create and save your individual questions from the question builder and save them. Next you can add your saved questions to your dashboard and arrange them in a way that makes it easy to scan and understand.

Some tips:

• Place the most important saved question cards near the top of the dashboard, or make them bigger than the other cards. That’ll help draw people’s attention to what matters most.
• If you have more than 10 cards on a dashboard, think about breaking the dashboard into two separate ones. You don’t want to overwhelm people with too much information, and each dashboard should revolve around one theme or topic. Remember — you can make as many dashboards as you want, so you don’t have to cram everything into just one.

Next: data model references

Sometimes you’ll need help understanding what data is available to you and what it means. Metabase provides a way for your administrators and data experts to build a data model reference to help you make sense of your database.