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Canvas basics

A dashboard is a canvas of cards — charts, tables, KPIs, text, images, filters — arranged on a grid, across one or more pages.

Open the Insert tab in the left panel. A Popular row covers the common picks (Column, Line, Area, Pie, KPI, Table, Stacked Bar, Combo), and the full palette is grouped by what you’re trying to show — comparison, trend, composition, distribution, relationship, geo, indicators, data, content, shapes. See Charts & formatting for the complete list.

Beyond charts, you can insert:

  • Content cards — Text, Heading, Image, Divider, Link, Button (navigate to a page or URL), Embed (iframe), and SQL (drop a SQL query result straight onto the canvas).
  • Shapes — rectangle, ellipse, triangle, line, arrow, and Callout notes (info/success/warning/danger) for annotation.
  • Filter cards — see Filters & interactivity.
  • Blocks — ready-made presets: a KPI row (three KPIs) or a Section (heading + divider).

Select a card to open Card Settings with three tabs:

  • Data — the field wells (what the chart shows), per-card filters, and a row limit.
  • Format — every visual option, searchable; see Charts & formatting.
  • Layout — exact numeric position and size.

Card headers have five presets — Plain, Accent bar, Filled band, Underline, Minimal — so a dashboard’s cards can share one visual rhythm without hand-styling each.

The editor has three modes, so you can work at the right altitude:

Mode For
Arrange layout only — move and resize without accidentally editing content
Edit the full authoring chrome
Preview see the live dashboard exactly as viewers will, without leaving the editor
  • Focus mode expands one card into an overlay (with its own fullscreen toggle) — for reading a dense table or presenting a single chart. Esc exits.
  • Present switches the whole dashboard to true browser fullscreen for meetings; the button flips to Exit.

Ctrl+S saves, Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z undo and redo, Del removes the selected card, and Ctrl+K opens the command palette. The full list is in Keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+/ in the app).

People with view access get the same dashboard minus the authoring chrome: they can filter, cross-filter, drill, use per-card controls, save bookmarks (Saved views), comment, refresh, present, ask AI, set metric alerts, and export — but not move, edit, or add cards. The full viewer guide is Exploring dashboards; access details in Sharing.