What is a question?
In Metabase, a question is a query, its results, and its visualization.
If you’re trying to figure something out about your data in Metabase, you’re probably either asking a question or viewing a question that someone else on your team created. In everyday usage, question is pretty much synonymous with query.
What you can do with questions in Metabase
You can ask questions in Metabase using the graphical query builder or the native query editor, and then do things like:
- Save your question to a collection so that you can come back to or build on it later.
- Add that question to relevant dashboards. Questions on a dashboard are known as cards.
- Set up email or Slack alerts on your question.
- Share the results of your question by sending links to people on your team — even to questions that you haven’t saved.
- Download the results of your question as CSV, XLSX, or JSON.
- Convert your saved question to a model.
Example question
Figure 1 shows a question based on Metabase’s Sample Database — the average rating of our company’s Products, broken out by Category. Here we’ve visualized this question as a bar chart:
And figure 2 shows what this same question looks like as a table:
Questions and the Metabase API
In the Metabase API, you can edit and get information about questions in your Metabase instance using the api/card route.
