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Charts & formatting

Add a chart and change its type, step by step

With no card selected a chart tile in Insert, on the rail, adds a card. With a chart selected, its quick bar’s Chart type (or a chart tile) changes that chart’s type and keeps its fields — the ones the new type has a well for — and its settings, such as Top N, drill-through, cross-filtering, conditional formatting and a bound metric.

Open the Fields tab and expand the model. Click a field to add it to the selected chart (with nothing selected, a click starts a new chart), or grab it anywhere on its row and drag it into a well.
In the Insert panel, choose a chart tile. With nothing selected it adds a new card. KPI and Table tiles always add a card.
With the card selected, click a field to add it. The KPI now totals order_total.
Add a Column chart the same way, then add a category field (channel) and a value field (order_total). The suggested chart type is named in the settings panel as Use <type>.
With a chart selected, a chart tile changes that chart to the new type and keeps its fields. Here Column became Bar.

Chart types

The Insert palette groups visuals by the question they answer — every type has its own page with field wells and usage guidance:

Group	Types
Comparison	Bar, Column, Stacked Bar, 100% Stacked Bar, Bullet, Lollipop, Pareto
Trend	Line, Area, Stacked Area, 100% Stacked Area, Combo, Combo Stacked, Sparkline
Composition	Pie, Donut, Treemap, Sunburst, Funnel, Waterfall, Sankey
Distribution	Histogram, Box Plot, Heatmap
Relationship	Scatter, Bubble, Radar
Geo	Map — world countries, US states, or any country’s states and provinces, chosen automatically from your data
Indicators	KPI, Gauge
Data	Table, Pivot Table

Content cards, shapes, filter cards, and blocks have pages too — see the full visual-type index.

Add fields to a chart

Fill a chart’s wells from the Fields tab: click a field, drop it on the chart, drop it on a well in Card settings, or use a well’s + Add field. Canvas basics walks through each way, keyboard included.

Where a field goes

A field you click, or drop on the chart itself, goes to the first well in this table with room for it. A dimension is any field that is not a number — text, a date or a time, true/false, a location — or a number the model marks as a dimension (a year, say). Other numbers are measures, and so is every SquareX measure, whatever it returns.

Chart	A dimension goes to	A measure goes to
Bar, Column, Stacked Bar, Line, Area, Stacked Area, Combo (Bar + Line), Waterfall, Histogram, Sparkline, Bullet	X Axis, then Series / Color, then Small multiples	Values (Y), beside the measures there
100% Stacked Bar, 100% Stacked Area, Combo (Stacked + Line)	X Axis, then Series / Color	Values (Y), beside the measures there
Pie, Donut, Treemap, Sunburst, Funnel	Category, then Color	Value, replacing the measure there
Pareto, Lollipop	Category	Value, replacing the measure there
Radar, Box Plot	Category	Values, beside the measures there
Heatmap	X Axis, then Y Axis	Value, replacing the measure there
Sankey	Source, then Target	Value, replacing the measure there
Scatter, Bubble	Color, for any field that is not a number	X Axis, then Y Axis, then Size, for any number; after that it replaces the one on Y Axis
Map	Location	Value, then Size; after that it replaces the one on Value
KPI, Gauge	nowhere: they show a single number	Value, replacing the measure there
Table	Columns	Columns
Pivot Table	Rows, then Columns, then More row levels	Values, beside the measures there

When every well a field could go to is full, the click is refused with a message saying so: drop the field on the well you want instead, and a well that holds one field swaps it. A field already on the chart stays where it is, and the message says which well it is in. A drop on a well, or + Add field, fills exactly the well you choose.

On a Map, a field whose name, or the last word of its name, is lat or latitude goes to Latitude — store_lat and pickupLatitude do, flat doesn’t — and one whose name or last word is lon, lng, long or longitude goes to Longitude, whatever its type: even a true/false is_long does. A SquareX measure goes to neither.
A SquareX measure never goes to a grouping well, so on a Scatter or a Bubble it starts at Y Axis; a Heatmap’s Value well refuses it, and so does a filter card.
A filter card holds one field: a click replaces it.

What a field is counted as

A field gets an aggregation when it lands in a well. The well decides it, the same whether you click the field in, drop it or add it with the well’s + Add field. Change it on the field’s pill.

A grouping well — X Axis, Category, Series / Color, Small multiples, a pivot’s rows and columns — never aggregates: its field splits the chart into groups. A pill there that was saved with an aggregation offers Group by and the field’s name to put it right. A heatmap’s Y Axis and a Sankey diagram’s Target are categories too: a field added there is not aggregated (NONE).
A number in Values is summed (SUM). A number the model marks as a dimension gets no aggregation (NONE): the chart draws each row’s own value until you pick an aggregation on its pill.
A number whose name reads like an id (id, customer_id) is counted once per value in Values (COUNT DISTINCT).
Text, dates and true/false values are counted (COUNT) in Values, Size or Tooltip. Set one in Values to NONE and the chart says Choose an aggregation for and the field’s name until you pick COUNT or COUNT DISTINCT on its pill.
In a table’s Columns, a number is summed (SUM), as in Values; other fields there are never aggregated.
A pill’s Move to has a simpler rule of its own: in a well that does not group, a number is summed (SUM) and anything else counted (COUNT) — an id-like number and a number the model marks as a dimension too, and on a heatmap’s Y Axis or a Sankey diagram’s Target as well.
A date on the X axis is grouped by month; pick another grain under Date bucket (X) on the Data tab. A time of day keeps its own values.
Calculated fields and SquareX measures aggregate in their own definition: their pills show ƒx auto instead of a list.
The list on a pill follows the field’s type: text and true/false fields offer COUNT, COUNT DISTINCT, MIN, MAX and NONE; dates offer EARLIEST and LATEST in place of MIN and MAX. Numbers offer the full list (MEDIAN only where the source can compute it).

Quick calculations

Every measure in a field well has a quick calc dropdown — per-chart calculations computed on the result, no measure required: running total, year-to-date, YoY %, Δ vs previous, % vs previous, moving average (with a window size), % of total, and rank. The chart’s legend and tooltips label the result (e.g. “Revenue (YTD)”). For reusable, model-wide versions of these, define a SquareX measure instead.

Configure and format a card, step by step

Select a card to open its settings: Data, Format and Layout.

Select a card. Its settings open on the right. The Data tab shows where the card gets its data and names its chart type; use Use <type> to accept the suggested one.
The Format tab controls the title, colors, axes, labels and data colors. Copy format and Paste format carry a style from one card to another.
The Layout tab sets the exact position and size of the card.
A KPI card can be bound to a governed metric with Bind to metric, so it always shows the one agreed definition.

Format options

The Format tab is searchable and shows only the sections relevant to the selected chart type:

Section	Controls
Typography	font family and sizes, title/text colors
General	in-chart title & subtitle, header-style preset, background, border, shadow, padding, chromeless container; KPI extras (invert trend colors, sparkline)
Axis	X/Y labels, dual axis, label size/color/rotation, grid lines, linear/log scale, axis titles, Y min/max
Numbers	display units (auto K/M/B, thousands, millions, billions), decimals, prefix, suffix — applied consistently to ticks, labels, tooltips, and KPI values
Columns (tables)	totals row; per-column rename, align, hide and width; search, filter row, paging, row numbers, frozen first column and CSV
Series	line width/style, markers, smooth/stepped; bar width, corner radius, opacity
Top N	keep the top N categories and group the rest into “Others” (with a custom label)
Map (maps)	location level (Auto-detect, World — countries, US states), allow pan & zoom, show the color scale with an optional min/max range, show the unmatched-locations notice
Colors	a colour tile per series, whose panel leads with Palettes for every series, and per-category colors; see Colours and fonts
Data Labels	show/hide, position (inside/outside/center), percentages on pie/donut, size, color, number format
Conditional Formatting	rules (greater/less/equals/between) driving background, text color, or bold
Analytics	reference lines (constant, average, median, min, max) and a trend line
Legend	show/hide, position, size, color
Tooltip	show/hide and trigger (axis or item)

To copy one card’s formatting onto others, use the format painter.

Header presets & chromeless cards

Card headers support five distinct style presets — Plain, Accent bar, Filled band, Underline, and Minimal — making it easy to unify the aesthetic across cards. For freeform canvas compositions, toggle chromeless cards under General to strip away the card background, padding, and border.

Per-category colors

Under Format → Colors → Category colours each category has a colour tile, named after it, that opens the colour panel — and the list is taken from the card’s own data, so it names the values actually in the chart. A tile’s empty swatch, The palette’s colour, returns that category to the palette, and Reset category colours clears them all at once. On a pie, a donut or a funnel the quick bar’s Colour opens the same colours as Slice colours, one slice at a time.

The tiles show up on single-measure charts with a category axis and no Series / Color field — pie, donut, funnel, bar, and column. Multi-series charts keep a tile per series instead. They’re offered on model-backed cards (not SQL or saved-query cards), and cover the first 30 categories.

Precedence: conditional-formatting rules override category colors, and category colors override the palette and per-series colors.

One colour per member across the dashboard

On a dashboard, a member of a field keeps one colour on every card: EMEA is the same colour in the revenue trend split by region, in the region pie and in the funnel beside them, and each measure drawn as its own series keeps its colour too.

The colours are the dashboard’s, kept with it. The first time a card draws a member for a signed-in reader (in the editor, the viewer, or an embed that shows the dashboard as them), the member gets the first theme colour no other member of its field has, and the dashboard keeps that choice: a later visit, another page opened first, a filter applied when it opens, or a cross-filter or slicer that takes members away never moves it. Exports draw the kept colours too, the PDF and PowerPoint files that scheduled sends and subscriptions email included (drawn with the colours of the person they’re sent as). Keeping a colour isn’t an edit: it doesn’t change when the dashboard was last edited, and an editor working on it at the same time can still save.

People who can’t see each other’s rows keep separate colours, so nobody learns a member from its colour. Someone whose row-level security limits their rows, or whom a field’s sensitivity label masks, gets colours of their own, counted only among the members they see; everyone else who’s signed in shares one set. Each shared link keeps its own colours, shared by its guests, and each embedded customer keeps its own, shared by its people. So a link’s colours can differ from the ones you see in the editor; within the link, a member keeps one colour on every page and visit. An API key adds no colours to the shared set.

While a cross-filter is on, a member it shows for the first time takes a colour for that visit only. When it clears, the cards draw every member again and the dashboard keeps their colours in the order they’re drawn unfiltered.

A dashboard keeps colours for up to 64 members of a field in each set, 512 across a set’s fields and 20,000 across all its sets, and a link, an embed or an API key adds at most 32 new members at a time. Past that, a member takes the next free colour of the view it’s drawn in, and isn’t kept. A field a label masks shows every member as ***: those members aren’t kept, and each draws in the colour of its place. Each request that adds members to a set others share is recorded in the audit log: who (or which link or embedded customer), and how many. To start again, an editor chooses Style → Reset colours…: every set’s colours are cleared (also recorded in the audit log), and each member takes its colour again, from the theme’s first, the next time a card draws it. A restored version keeps the colours, and a copy of the dashboard starts its own.

Each field counts its colours on its own, and so do the measures: a card of Revenue and Target draws in the theme’s first two colours however many regions other cards show, and two members of the same field never share a colour. Past the theme’s colours come shades of them that still read on the page and the cards and stay clearly apart from the colours a good or bad change is drawn in. Switching the theme recolours them all together.

A card’s own colours still win: a palette applied from Palettes for every series, per-series overrides or category colours. A chart of one series keeps the theme’s first colour, and saved-query and SQL cards, whose columns name no model field, keep the theme’s colours in their own order.

Tables and hierarchy matrices

A table card can search and filter its returned rows, sort them, then page or scroll the result. Enable the relevant options in Format → Columns. Search covers visible columns; per-column filters support text matching, operators and ranges. Totals cover the entire filtered result, not just the displayed page or scroll window. CSV uses the filtered and sorted result. These are interactions with the captured query result, not a promise that every source row was fetched.

Use column widths and the frozen first column to keep identifiers readable in wide tables. Rows and wide columns are rendered as a visible window for performance; scrolling does not discard the captured values. Date display follows the workspace format; sorting, cross-filter selection and CSV retain raw values. Search/filter can match both the displayed and stored date.

For a Pivot Table, add Rows, More row levels, Columns, More column levels and Values. In Hierarchy and cell visuals, turn on Use hierarchy grid. Expand the displayed hierarchy to inspect deeper groups; subtotals recalculate the measure at that level. Averages, distinct counts and ratios cannot generally be reconstructed by adding child cells.

The matrix controls include row layout, per-measure display formats, data bars, icons, sparklines and link templates. HTTP/HTTPS link templates can use {value}, {row} and {column}; substitutions are encoded. Public shares and older clients can show only the first level. Read the scope and support notice in each client.

Hierarchy exports distinguish full bounded data capture from visible-window image downloads. Server report formats can preserve supported measure formatting and cell visuals; CSV retains raw values. Export scales can cover more groups than the currently expanded browser view.

For a page-oriented table or document matrix, use paginated reporting. Its paper layout, repeated sections, calculation evidence and saved-report comparisons have a different scope.

Small multiples (trellis)

On cartesian charts (bar, column, line, area, and their stacked variants), bind a field to the Small multiples well and the chart splits into one mini-panel per value — the classic trellis view for comparing a metric across categories. Set the column count under Format → Axis (leave blank for automatic).

Richer tooltips

Add fields to the Tooltip well to enrich the hover tooltip with values that aren’t otherwise on the chart. The Map has a Tooltip well too — the extra fields appear under the region name.

Canvas basics
Filters & interactivity
Themes — palettes and chart detail tokens come from the theme.