Book Image

Metabase Up and Running

By : Tim Abraham
Book Image

Metabase Up and Running

By: Tim Abraham

Overview of this book

Metabase is an open source business intelligence tool that helps you use data to answer questions about your business. This book will give you a detailed introduction to using Metabase in your organization to get the most value from your data. You’ll start by installing and setting up Metabase on your local computer. You’ll then progress to handling the administration aspect of Metabase by learning how to configure and deploy Metabase, manage accounts, and execute administrative tasks such as adding users and creating permissions and metadata. Complete with examples and detailed instructions, this book shows you how to create different visualizations, charts, and dashboards to gain insights from your data. As you advance, you’ll learn how to share the results with peers in your organization and cover production-related aspects such as embedding Metabase and auditing performance. Throughout the book, you’ll explore the entire data analytics process—from connecting your data sources, visualizing data, and creating dashboards through to daily reporting. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to implement Metabase as an integral tool in your organization.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Installing and Deploying Metabase
4
Section 2: Setting Up Your Instance and Asking Questions of Your Data
12
Section 3: Advanced Functionality and Paid Features

Chapter 7: Creating Visualizations

At this point, we have learned how to create questions, the fundamental building block in Metabase. Questions, as you may have gathered by now, are really more like answers. A saved question such as How many orders have been placed? tells us the answer to that question.

So far, we've mostly ignored considerations around how to present the data returned from a question. Up to this point, we've been letting Metabase make its best guess about what the output data should look like – that is, whether it should be displayed as a table of data, such as a spreadsheet, or rendered as a line or bar plot.

Visualizing data is an important tenant of analytics. Just as a picture can be worth a thousand words, a good visualization can communicate far more than the sum of its parts. In this chapter, we will learn about all the visualization options Metabase offers, including how to use them to create goals. Specifically, we will cover the following...