Feature Friday 3 - The one with the curious cat

🌟 Feature Friday! 🌟

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The one with the curious cat

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🐈‍⬛ Whether human or feline,

🔎 Sometimes you wanna see the data that's underlyin'.

🤷‍♀️ But when a data point just isn't quite enough,

⚡️ You can now use Lightdash to become a data buff!

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Hello all and welcome to another glorious Feature Friday! In the last two weeks, the Lightdash team has been hard at work, talking to our users, shipping important features and squashing bugs. The theme this week is centered around ease of use, with a new feature that lets you dig deeper into data points, another feature that makes it easier to deal with dashboards, and some sidebar spring cleaning.

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🆕 Feature showcase!

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A selection of the new features we've launched in the last two weeks.

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View underlying data

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You can now view the underlying data for any value in a chart or table!

🔬 Have you ever looked at a chart and spotted a number that you want to know more about? Well, as of the latest Lightdash release, this is now possible from within the table explorer, or from a dashboard.

All you need to do is hover over the value you're curious about, click into it, and select "View underlying data" from the context menu. You'll be shown the underlying data that makes up that individual data point in a nice handy table.

🔭 Still curious? Well from the underlying data, you can also select "Explore from here" to be taken to the table explorer with the current field selections and filters applied.

Read the docs to learn more or see it in action!

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Dashboard duplication

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You can now easily duplicate any dashboard, and it's even easier to delete them! 

❓ Do you want to iterate on a dashboard without making changes to the original? Or perhaps you want to show the same dashboard in multiple spaces without having to painstakingly recreate it? Well now this is possible in Lightdash! 

Whether you're in the dashboard, or you're looking at the list of dashboards, from the action menu, you can easily duplicate the dashboard. It will create it within the same space but it's easy to move it to any other one in the project. And if you get trigger happy with the duplication, there's also a delete button in the action menu. 

See it in action! 

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Sidebar spring cleaning

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The sidebar in our table explorer is a difficult thing to get right - trust us, we've iterated a few times and listened to loads of feedback. It needs to be powerful enough to do what you need, it needs to be simple enough so that it's easy to use, and it needs to be organised enough so that you know where to find things. 

🧹 That's why we've cleaned it up a bit more, with a better use of whitespace, clearer icons, better colour-coding and a cleaner grouping of metrics and dimensions. For more info, check out #2685 and #2854.

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👩‍🏭 Friday Facts

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Some of our favourite facts and stats from the last two weeks.

• ✅ All-time Github issues closed: 1156
• ☑️ Current open issues: 328
• 🗂 Current Lightdash release version: v0.224.0
• 🔥 Community growth since last Feature Friday +21%
• 😻 Number of feline friends across the Lightdash team: 3*

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By the way, if you're not in our 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.

*That's our very own Seymour making his big screen debut in the header image of this post!

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🐛 Bug fixes

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Just a small selection of the nasty bugs we've squashed in the last two weeks (yes, there were even more!):

• 🚣‍♀️ We fixed a bug with rows in table chart types. [#3001]
• 📊 Charts weren't loading in some cases. It was a SQL issue! [#2982] 
• 🏎 Ordering columns was a bit slow so we sped it up. [#2958]
• 🕰 Timezone conversion is now handled better. [#2947, #2931]
• 😔 Timezone issues again! This time it was Snowflake specific. [#2826]
• 📛 Renaming a space from the home screen now actually renames the correct space, rather than just the last edited! [#2936]
• 🧮 Renaming a sorted table calc now no longer errors out. [#2896]
• ❌ You can now actually delete an old field from a chart that has been removed from the dbt model. [#2924]
• 🏷 The labels of a table calc series in a chart no longer overlap! [#2874]
• 📩 .csv exports now properly represent the raw data rather than the plotted data. [#2672]

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Thank you to our wonderful community for continuing to use Lightdash and be open and honest with feedback and bugs. We love bug reports more than breakfast, so keep them coming!

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💎 Milestone Mayhem

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We're using Github milestones to track the larger pieces of upcoming work. You can also check out our public roadmap for a longer term view.

• 🕰 We have a love/hate relationship with timezones. They're absolutely crucial to the world, but handling timezones gracefully across systems and data warehouses, and showing a user data in the expected timezone is hard enough to justify a whole milestone...
• 🔐 Better permissions is one of our most requested features, particularly from larger customers. There are a ton of usability considerations that we're working out and scoping.
• 📤 We'll also be focusing on sharing charts and dashboards - starting with Slack.

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💞 That's it for today

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📡 Stay tuned for the next one in two weeks.

👷‍♀️ 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

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Much love from the Lightdash team ❤️