Feature Day

Feature day! 🚀

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It's been 112 days since our last demo week - it’s been a busy quarter for Lightdash and our Community! During this time, 506 issues have been created on our repo, with two thirds of those being closed….

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Of these 506, about half were feature requests through working with our beta users, and of those feature requests, we’ve managed to close off 132 of them - that’s more than 1 per day!

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If you’ve been keeping up with the Lightdash Demo Week, you may have seen our other posts focusing on the Developer Workflow with Lightdash and the CLI tool that we’ve just announced. The Lightdash Way means building a great user experience for both producers and consumers, so don’t worry data consumers, we haven’t forgotten about you! In fact, of all the features we’ve released in the last quarter, just under half were focused on data consumer stories around appearance, customisation, permissions and user/org management. So, this blog post is dedicated to every dashboard consumer and BI tool admin out there 🕯.

We've released a ton of cool features for data consumers that center around a few key themes: 📊 Charting, 📤 Sharing, 💄 Appearance and 🔭 Discovery. Let's get straight into them!

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📊 The Art of Charts

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Area charts (Issue #2284) provide a useful way of looking at volumes or quantities over time, for example the total order value by week for an online store.

If you've made a chart you're particularly proud of, now, you can duplicate it to your hearts content! The ability to duplicate charts (Issue #1654) also lets you use a useful chart as a basis for a new chart, allowing you to slice your data another way, or give it a fresh look.

Focus and geek-out on your beautiful chart with view-mode (Issue #2088), a full-width view of your chart without all the editing tools. Need to tweak the chart? Choose from "Explore from here" or "Edit chart" to get your tools back and start perfecting that analysis 👌

To learn more about what you can do with charts - check out The art of making charts in Lightdash.

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💌 Sharing is caring

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They say that once you get Lightdash, you just can’t help but spread the joy. That’s why we’ve introduced Invites (Issue #2209)! You can now send and manage invites within your project settings. You can even set the role of the user on inviting so you don’t then have to manually configure those in a separate screen. Once you’ve made the invite, you can always revoke it later (before they join!) if you decide you don’t like them anymore.

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Project level permissions (Issue #2438) was one of our most requested features, particularly from larger organisations with multiple projects. You can now set permissions per user at a project level, with inheritance of permissions from the organisation level! Users can be one of “Viewer”, “Editor”, or “Admin” so that you can fine tune who can see/edit/manage each project.

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Sometimes, you’re just so proud of your nice chart that you want to share it with all your friends. Now, you can easily export any saved or drafted chart to JPEG, PNG, SVG, PDF. What’s next, sharing dashboards?

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We got bored of having to go through a laundry list of customisations every time we wanted to duplicate or move a chart. So, we’ve made it possible to export the JSON too, because, why not!? This is also the first nod towards having all your charts and dashboards saved as code... coming soon!

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💄 Appearance counts

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You can now set a default colour palette (Issue #1572) for all new and existing charts in settings! Maybe use your brand colours so that charts and dashboards you share with your users or clients all match. Or, you could just paint it all black if you’re having one of those days.

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"Is that in Dollars? Pounds? Number of dolphins per century?" No more will your dashboard viewers be asking these questions! You can now Format dimensions and metrics with currencies, percentages, and more (Issue #372). One of our most requested features was to represent numbers such as $1.23 or 73.5%, this is now possible using the new round and format options in your metric definitions. (Feel free to open an issue for dolphins per century 🐬).

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And that’s just a small selection of everything we've shipped in the last quarter. If you want to take a look at what else we’ve been releasing, check out our changelog - don’t worry it’s not all just text, there are GIFs there too 🎉. If all you want is a laundry list then here you go:

Featured in this blog post:

• Area charts
• Email invites
• Duplicating charts
• Invite management
• Export chart as json
• Default colour palette
• Project level permissions
• Export chart as image/pdf
• Full width chart view mode
• Number formatting (round, format, currency)

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And everything else:

• Dashboard "Last edited by" indicator
• Configurable axis range in charts
• Project compilation status
• Running total calculations
• Duplicating dashboards
• 1 click deploy to render
• Improved field search
• Charts in SQL runner
• Search saved charts
• Support for € Euros!
• “Explore from here”
• The Lightdash CLI!
• Multiple axes
• Table sorting

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❓ If you want to learn more about HOW we go about prioritising all of the features we know we need to build, along with those requested by our community, then take a look at our recent blog post on How we do Product Planning at Lightdash.

🛝 If you want something a bit more, then head on over to our Slack Community where you’ll be able to chat directly with all of us at Lightdash and all the other amazing members of our community. We’re happy to talk about anything from feature requests, implementation details or dbt quirks to memes and SQL jokes!

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