Basic exploration

See what your teammates have made

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 collections you have access to.

Command palette

The command palette lets you create new things, search your content, or jump to anywhere in your Metabase.

To bring up the command palette, hit cmd/ctrl + k. That’s cmd + k for Macs, or ctrl + k for Windows PCs.

You can use the command palette to:

• Create new things (like new questions and dashboards)
• Find things (saved questions, dashboards, models, etc.)
• Find and jump to Admin and account settings.

So anytime you want to do or find anything in Metabase, just hit cmd/ctrl + k and start typing what you want to do.

The command palette is currently unavailable in interactive embedding contexts.

Advanced search

To filter your search results, hit cmd/ctrl + k to bring up the command palette and enter your search term. The first result is a link to “Search and filter all X results”.

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 which collection each item is saved in, what kind of object it is, and whether it’s pinned. Note that you’ll only ever see items in that are in collections you have permission to view.

You can search by:

• Content type: dashboard, question, model, collection, database, table.
• Creator: who made the thing.
• Last editor: who made the last saved change on the thing.
• Creation date: when the thing entered our universe.
• Last edit date: when someone last cared enough to update the thing.
• Verified items only. Only show items that have been verified.
• Search the contents of native queries: search through the SQL/native code in questions.
• Search items in trash: include the depths of oblivion in your search.

Browse your data

To explore databases and models, click on either the Models or Databases browsers in the left sidebar.

Browse models

The models browser list all the models in your Metabase. Pro and Enterprise plans include the ability to filter for Verified models.

Browse databases

The data browser will list all the databases connected to your Metabase. Hover over a table and click on the bolt icon to X-ray the table, or click on the book icon to view more info about the table: its fields and their descriptions (if any), what questions are based on that table, and more.

To learn more, see Exploring data with Metabase’s data browser.

Exploring collections

Collections in Metabase are a lot like folders. They’re where Metabase keeps all your team’s dashboards and charts.

Your teammates might have pinned some important dashboards or questions within your collections; if so, those pinned items will show up as cards at the top of the collection.

Collections have a list of any other items that are saved within them, and you can see what other collections are saved inside of the current one by checking out the navigation sidebar.

Models

You can use Models to create derived tables on the fly. See Models.

Exploring dashboards

Dashboards are a set of questions and text cards that you want to be able to refer to regularly.

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 the Action menu, with actions you can take to dive deeper into that result, branch off from it in a different direction, or see automatic insights to X-ray the data.

In this example of orders by product category per month, clicking on a data point on this line chart gives us the ability to:

• See these Orders: See a list of the orders for a particular month.
• See this month by week.
• Break out by …: See things like the Gizmo orders in June 2023 broken out by the status of the customer (e.g., new or VIP). Different charts will have different breakout options, such as Location and Time.
• Automatic insights: See orders for a particular category over a shorter time range.
• Filter by this value: update the chart based on the value you clicked: equal to, less than, greater than, or not equal to.

Note that while charts created with SQL don’t currently have the drill-through menu, you can add SQL questions to a dashboard and customize their click behavior. You can send people to a custom destination (like another dashboard or an external URL), or have the clicked value update a dashboard filter.

Clicking on a table cell will often allow you to filter the results using a comparison operator, like =, >, or <. For example, you can click on a table cell, and select the less than operator < to filter for values that are less than the selected value.

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. For example, you can click on a customer’s ID to see the profile view for that customer.

When you add questions to a dashboard, you can have even more control over what happens when people click on your chart. In addition to the default drill-through menu, you can add a custom destination or update a filter. Check out interactive dashboards. to learn more.

Exploring saved questions

In Metabase parlance, every chart 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 summing the values of a column, or filtering based on that column.

One of our personal favorite ways to explore is with the Distribution option. This will show you how many rows there are in a given table, grouped by the column you clicked on. So if you have a Users table, if you click on an Age column and select Distribution, you’ll see a bar chart with the count of users you have in each age bracket.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are a way to quickly get back to things you visit frequently (or have been working on recently). Bookmarked items show up in the main navigation sidebar above collections.

To bookmark an item, look for the ribbon icon in the upper right corner of the item’s page. You can bookmark:

• Questions
• Models
• Dashboards
• Collections

To add or remove a bookmark from an item, click on the three-dot menu (…) next to the item in the collection.

Some things to remember with bookmarks:

• Bookmarks are personal; other people can’t see your bookmarks. If you want to highlight something for everyone, you’ll want to put it in an official collection and/or pin the item in the collection (see collections).
• If you end up bookmarking a lot of items, you can collapse the bookmarks section in the sidebar (or remove the bookmarks that are just getting in your way).
• Items that you bookmark will get a boost in your search results (but not the search results of other people).
• To reorder bookmarks, simply drag and drop them in the sidebar.

Verified items

Verified questions and models are marked with a blue checkmark icon:

Administrators can Verify a question or model from the three dot menu (...) to signal that they’ve reviewed the item and deemed it to be trustworthy. That is: the question or model is filtering the right columns, summarizing the right metrics, and querying records from the right tables. Verified items are more likely to show up higher in search suggestions and search results.

If someone modifies a verified question, the question will lose its verified status, and an administrator will need to review and verify the question again to restore its verified status.