Collections

After your team has been using Metabase for a while, you’ll probably end up with lots of saved questions and dashboards.

Collections are the main way to organize questions, dashboards, and models. You can think of them like folders or directories. You can nest collections in other collections, and move collections around. One thing to note is that a single item, like a question or dashboard, can only be in one collection at a time (excluding parent collections).

Collection types

Regular collections

They’re like file-system folders. You can put stuff in them.

Official collections

Metabase admins can designate collections as “official” with the following effects:

• These collections have a yellow badge to let people know that the items in the collection are the ones people should be looking at (or whatever “official” means to you).
• Questions in Official collections added to Dashboards that are not in Official collections will show an Official badge next to their name on the Dashboard.
• Questions and dashboards in Official collections are also more likely to show up at the top of search results.

Pairing Official badges with verified items can help everyone in your Metabase sort out which questions people can trust.

To add an Official badge to a collection, an admin can visit the collection and click on the dot dot dot menu (…) and select Make collection official. Admins can also remove an Official badge in the same menu. Admins can also mark a collection as Official or not when they first create the collection.

Collection permissions

Administrators can give you different kinds of access to each collection:

• 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.

To share items in your personal collection, for example to add a question in your personal collection to a dashboard in a public collection, you’ll first need to move that item to a public collection.

Pinned items

In each collection, you can pin important or useful dashboards, models, and 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.

If you just want to organize your favorite items, you should bookmark them (only you can see your bookmarks).

Moving items from collection to collection

To move an item 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 item 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. Metabase admins can move items into (and out of) anyone’s personal collection.

Events and timelines

You can add events to collections, and organize those events into timelines. See Events and timelines.

Uploading data

You can upload CSV data by clicking on the Upload icon in the top right of the collection page.

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Metabase will create a model that contains that CSV data, as well as the model’s underlying table.

Uploads will only be available if your admin has enabled uploads for your Metabase, and you’re in a group with Unrestricted access to the schema used to store those uploads. See Uploading data.

Appending to a model created by an upload

You can upload additional CSV data to an existing model created by a previous CSV upload.

The uploaded CSV must have the same column name, order, and type as the columns in the model. Metabase will look for a header row to check that the column names are the same. So if you split a large CSV into multiple CSVs, make sure to include header rows for all of the files.

When appending, Metabase will simply insert the rows into the underlying table, which will update the model that sits on top of that table. If you have duplicate rows from one upload to the next, Metabase will preserve those duplicate rows.

The upload icon will only be visible on models created by uploads.

Further reading

• Keeping your analytics organized
• Multiple environments