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😭 It's the final day of the Lightdash Demo Week for this quarter.
🤩 But that's fine because today we have a firecracker of features to celebrate! The team has been super hard at work in 2023 and we've hit a ton of milestones we're excited to announce....
But more on the features later! In case you missed one of our previous updates, here's a quick roundup of what we've shared so far this week:
- 🎬 CEO and Co-founder, Hamzah kicking things off and announcing our new Cloud Pro tier.
- 🗂️ Superstar engineer, Irakli with best practices for curating your content to avoid BI bloat and make life easy for your business users.
- 🎓 Head of Product + Data, Katie with tips and supporting material for getting your business users onboarded onto Lightdash.
- 📊 CTO and Co-founder, Oliver on how to build interactive dashboards, empowering users to easily find the answers to their questions.
✨ 2023 so far, in numbers
🗞️ 1998: The year Google was founded. The year the first iMac came out. Also, the total number of closed issues on our Github repo.(we tried to hit 2000 by time of publication but we're not about just closing real things for fun)
📦 1000: We hit our 1000th release on 17 March. That's 50 upgrades every single month on average.
🐦 1000 (again): Our Twitter following hit this number on 14 April just in time for our last day of demo week!
And for followers of our Feature Friday newsletter, here are the much-loved Friday Facts:
- ✅ All-time Github issues closed: 1998 (6.5 issues/workday in 2023!)
- 🗓️ Issues closed in 2023: 407
- ☑️ Current open issues: 564
- 🗂 Current Lightdash release version: v0.510.3
- 🔥 Community growth in 2023: +44% (570 to 822)
- 😻 Number of Lightdash supporters in the dbt Slack Community: 592
By the way, if you're not in our own Slack Community already then you are really being left out of all of the real fun... join here. It's free, easy, and you get to chat to us and the rest of our community. Whenever you want. Forever. dbt tips? Lightdash feature requests? SQL jokes? We have it all.
🆕 Feature showcase
A selection of the new features we've launched in the last 4 months. Here's the laundry list, but don't worry we'll go into detail below!
📤 Sharing and scheduling
- Scheduled deliveries by Email or Slack
- Sharing in Slack with visual previews
📊 Usage analytics
- Usage dashboard
- View counts for every Chart and Dashboard
🔐 Roles and permissions
- Private spaces
- Allowed email domains for easy onboarding
- Updated Editor role with removed SQL Runner access
- New Viewer role
🗂️ Content curation
- Chart and Dashboard pinning
- Percentile metrics
📈 Chart configuration
- Conditional formatting for tables
- Reference lines
📐 Dashboard interactivity
- New and improved filters
- Drill-by
🏡 Homepage redesign
- Chart and Dashboard usage counts made visible on the listings
- Helpful iconography
- Tabbed content organisation
- "Most Popular", "Recently Updated" and "Recently Viewed" sections
If you want to take a look at what else we’ve been releasing, then take a look at our changelog - don’t worry it’s not all just text, there are GIFs there too 🎉. But for now, let's go straight into a deep dive of the features!
📤 Sharing and scheduling
🗓️ Scheduled deliveries
You can now set up scheduled reports to be delivered via email or Slack at your desired schedule!
Ever wanted to automate that KPI dashboard so it went out to your whole team every Monday morning? Ever wanted to send a customer a report on their usage every month?
With scheduled deliveries in Lightdash, now you can! This feature lets you send a dashboard or saved chart (as an image, or a .csv) to people via email or Slack - even to those who don't have an account in your Lightdash instance.
You can set up schedule deliveries to be sent via Slack or email and you can send individual charts or an entire dashboard. You can set up as many scheduled deliveries to a saved chart or dashboard as you like, and if you make any changes to the content, the reports will be updated accordingly.
To try it out, click on the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of your chart or dashboard, then click on scheduled deliveries.
See it in action, or learn more in our docs.
🪢 Sharing charts and dashboards via Slack
We now support sharing charts and dashboards via Slack with a handy preview.
All you need to do is head to the Settings in your Lightdash instance, and find the new Slack menu. When you select "Add to Slack", and add Lightdash to your Slack Organization. Then, when sharing a Lightdash URL within your Slack Org, you'll be presented with the title of the chart/dashboard, description and even a full image preview of its very latest state. There's even an "Open in Lightdash" button that will take you straight there.
See it in action, or learn more in our docs.
📊 Usage analytics
📊 Usage dashboard
You can now see the key usage statistics for internal use of your Lightdash project! If you've ever wondered:
- What's the overall breakdown of users across viewers, editors and admins?
- How many users run a query once a week?
- Who runs the most queries?
- Who makes the most changes to content?
Then Usage Analytics is the place for you. You'll find answers to the questions above, and more. This can be helpful to understand internal BI adoption, along with the value provided over time. To get there, just head over to your "Project Settings" and within "Project Management" you'll find the "Usage Analytics" tab. In upcoming releases, we'll add the number of views and updates for every chart and dashboard to help you understand the most (and least 💀) useful content.
See it in action, or learn more in our docs.
👀 Chart + Dashboard view counts
Charts and Dashboards now show their overall number of views!
Further to our new Usage Analytics feature, now you can see how popular each chart and dashboard is, both in the header on every individual chart and dashboard, along with on your project homepage in the chart and dashboard listings. This feature is really useful for understanding which content is most important, plus it can be used to help clean up unpopular content! For charts, the view count is incremented every time someone views a chart both on its own, or as part of a dashboard. Note that the view count starts either from when the chart/dashboard was created OR from when we released this feature (whichever is newer).
See it in action, or learn more in our docs.
🔐 Roles and permissions
🔐 Private spaces
You can now set permissions for Spaces to restrict access.
Only members that are invited to a Space with Restricted Access have access to it. Full Access Spaces are available to everyone who has access to the project the space is in. To update a Space's access, just hit on the Share button in your Space.
See it in action, or learn more in our docs.
🔓 Grant easy access to your workspace for your whole team
You can set allowed email domains in Lightdash - letting anyone from your team join without needing an invite.
As a reminder, Lightdash lets you have unlimited users in your workspace, so no more rationing out BI tool licenses! To make it even easier to join, as an admin, you can set a list of allowed email domains who can join your workspace without an explicit invite link. When they sign up for Lightdash, they'll be offered to join your workspace.
See it in action, or learn more in our docs.
✏️ We've renamed the Editor User Role
We've renamed the "Project Editor" User Role to "Project Developer" to provide you with more permission granularity.
Everyone in your project that was an Editor has been automatically renamed as a Developer, which has the exact same permissions as the previous Editor role.
However, Editor remains, with the only difference being that Editors can no longer use the SQL runner.
🚔 More roles, more permissions!
We've officially added two new role types to Lightdash.
- Viewer: This is now a true view-only role, these users can view existing content they have access to, but can't update, change or create anything new. Great for sharing with larger teams or external parties.
- Editor: Mentioned above, but editors now don't have access to the SQL runner by default, there is a new Developer role that you can grant that gives users SQL runner access.
🗂️ Content curation
📍 Pinning charts and dashboards
You can now pin charts and dashboards to your project homepage.
Get your whole team focused on that KPI dashboard! All you need to do is select the more actions menu on a chart or dashboard (on the project homepage, or in a space), and then select "Pin to homepage". On refresh, that item will now be pinned for everyone that has the relevant permissions to see it. We have plenty of improvements coming to this feature to make it easier to use and also allow pinning of Spaces… watch this 'space'!
See it in action, or learn more in our docs.
💯 Percentile Metrics
We now support Percentile metric types.
This new metric type generates the given percentile of the values in the given field. You could use it to create an easy median, or, say an upper quartile.
The percentile metric can be used on any numeric dimension or, for custom SQL, any valid SQL expression that gives a numeric table column.
In the example below, the "median_price" metric is created by taking the 50th percentile of the "item_price" dimension…
See it in action, or learn more in our docs (there's an example you can copy!)
📈 Chart configuration
🎯 Reference lines
Add reference lines to your charts with just the click of a button. You can use reference lines to set targets, track your goals, or point out important thresholds in your charts.
See it in action, or learn more in our docs.
🌈 Conditional Formatting
You can now apply conditional formatting to values in table charts.
Sometimes it’s helpful to highlight certain values in your tables when they meet a specific condition. You can set up conditional formatting rules by going to the Configure tab on the table chart and then selecting the "Conditional formatting" tab.
See it in action, or learn more in our docs.
📐 Dashboard interactivity
✨ New and improved dashboard filters
More granular dashboard filters have arrived! With our new and improved dashboard filters, you can now:
- Apply a dashboard filter to a subset of tiles
- Pick which field to use for a tile's filter
See it in action, or learn more in our docs.
🔩 Drill-by
You can drill into a metric in your chart or results table to better understand a point in your chart. Selecting drill by lets you group your metric by a dimension, like the total revenue segmented by (or grouped by) product type.
See it in action, or learn more in our docs.
🏡 Homepage redesign
Based on your feedback, we've made the homepage a lot more useful and less scary! Here's a summary of everything we've done to support this:
- Decided on a new UI library! We'll be switching over from Blueprint to the beautiful and configurable Mantine.
- Created a separate page for listing all Spaces. Check it out in our demo!
- Updated the appearance of Charts and Dashboards listings, with brand new icons.
- Tabbed view for Charts and Dashboards within a Space.
- Added 'Most popular' and 'Recently updated' tabs.
- Added a permissions and content summary on hovering over a Space.
- Made view counts visible on listings for Dashboards, Charts and Spaces.
- Combined Charts and Dashboards into one 'Recently Viewed' panel.
- Removed 'Spaces' from the top of the homepage and added the 'Pinned' panel.
If you want to take a look at what else we’ve been releasing, then take a look at our changelog - don’t worry it’s not all just text, there are GIFs there too 🎉.
💞 That's it for demo week
🤔 We hope you've enjoyed learning about what we've been up to over the last quarter at Lightdash, and hopefully you found our posts on Best practices for curating content, getting business users onboarded, and dashboard interactivity useful. Let us know what you think in the Community - we ❤️ feedback of all kinds!
📡 Stay tuned for the upcoming Feature Fridays, and the next demo week in a few months time....
👷♀️ If you're interested in what we're building here, get involved! Don’t watch from the sidelines, help us build the future of BI. We’ve got something for everybody:
- Join us in the Lightdash Community Slack
- Show us some open-source love and star the repo on GitHub (we plant a tree for every star we get! ⭐ 👉 🌱 )
- Try out our hosted offering - Lightdash Cloud
Much love from the Lightdash team ❤️
