Dashboards in Metabase

by Jessie Zairo on Apr 21, 2023

Dashboards in Metabase are a powerful way to pull together multiple questions and gather them into a single location to present to your audience. Dashboards are great because they can be used as a tool to analyze data on the staff side or present to the public. Whether your audience is the Library Board of Trustees, Friends of the Library, Dean of the College or University, or your patrons and users, you can create beautiful, interactive presentations to take your message to the next level.

Dashboards are a great way for you to share reports with a set of specific data (like circulation or collection development). Administrators can even set up subscriptions to dashboards via email or Slack. Your recipients do not need to be actives users in Metabase to receive the exported results of the dashboard’s questions.

Creating a Dashboard

1. From the +New dropdown menu in the top right of the screen, select New Dashboard.
2. Enter a name and a description and select a collection from the "Which Collections should this go in" to organize your dashboard.
3. Click Create.
4. From the new dashboard, click + to add questions
5. Type the question or report you want to add into the dashboard
6. From the results click on the questions to add them to the dashboard
7. You can then drag and drop to move the questions in the order of your desired presentation
8. When clicking on the cards (or reports) you can edit the card in 2 ways
   1. Visualization Options - click the pallet icon to make changes to the columns, add a description or change the conditional formatting.
   2. Click Behavior - allows you to select if the card opens in a certain way
9. Use he filtering options, three horizontal lines in the right hand corer, to filer by time, location, ID, number, text or category.
10. Click Save.

Adding Text Boxes

Metabase allows your staff to add text cards within your dashboard. Tex Cards are a great way to include headings or descriptions within the dashboard or social media images, branding, or logos! Text cards make it easy to create breaks in between your questions and reports or to link out to your OPAC, Discovery or library website.

1. From your dashboard, click on the Aa in the top-right corner (next to the +).
2. Clicking on the color pallet icon allows you to adjust text/markdown.
3. Clicking on the eye allows you to preview it.
4. Markdown allows you to format the text, embed linked images (from OPAC, Discovery, Social Media or Website).
5. Click save.

Public Dashboards

When public sharing has been turned on in Metabase, users can click on the sharing icon access a public link. Public links allow your staff to show off all the great reports and data they have created. These can be viewed by anyone, even if they don’t have access to Metabase.

Staff can also use the public embedding code to embed their dashboard on the library website, OPAC or Discovery layer.

Dashboard Subscriptions

Staff can send the results of questions on a dashboard to other staff members, colleagues or constituents via email or Slack with dashboard subscriptions in Metabase. Subscriptions can be created for staff or others who do not have an account in Metabase.

Once you create a dashboard, you can add subscribers to it.

1. From your dashboard click on the icon for an envelope with a plus sign in the upper right hand corner.
2. Click Email it , this will allow you to enter names of Metabase users in your system or type in an email of an individual who doesn't have an account.
3. Next select the frequency, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly.
4. You can choose to not send the dashboard results if there aren't any results in the report.
5. You can also select to attach the report as a csv or xlsx for any report in the dashboard.
6. Once finished, click send email now.

Additional Resources

How Metabase Works

Monday Minutes: Metabase

Metabase Community Documentation