Liveboards

Liveboards act like live dashboards. They are collections of your related Answers, in the form of charts and tables, and your headline metrics.

You can pin charts, tables, and headlines to any Liveboard which you created, and those that have been shared with you with the Edit privilege. When you create a Liveboard, you can share it with other people with either the View or Edit privilege. Liveboards are interactive, allowing you to perform actions like drilling down on answers, filtering, excluding values, and exploring answers or headlines.

Sample Liveboard

This is an example of a Liveboard you might create or view, as a member of a retailer’s Sales department:

Open

Notice that you can explore any visualization, follow any headline, or perform a number of other actions using the ellipsis menu at the top right corner of a visualization.

Using filters

You can filter a Liveboard to only see the relevant data. Click the ellipsis icon at the top right corner of the Liveboard, next to the Follow and Share buttons. Select Add filters. Note that you need access to the underlying data source to be able to filter a Liveboard.

Choose a column to filter on, and select values to include or exclude.

Getting to insights

You can leverage Liveboards to gain insights into your data in several ways. Answer Explorer, ThoughtSpot’s AI-guided exploration of answers and headline metrics within Liveboards, provides you with valuable suggestions on how to explore and understand your data. The feature suggests ways to answer questions that are relevant to many other users, and it takes into account your own ThoughtSpot history. Use Answer Explorer to filter an answer or headline, run comparisons, replace items in an answer, or add additional elements to an answer.

Liveboards always have the most current data. If you follow a Liveboard or a pinned headline metric, you can schedule regular updates on that Liveboard or pinned headline, and track its changes.

You can also drill down on any answer in a Liveboard. See Drilling down.

Drilling down

When you drill down, you can see more information about the data within your search. You can drill down into a datapoint to get a finer grained view of that datapoint and the data behind it. Move easily from a general view of your information to a more specific representation of the data behind a datapoint at a click. For example, in a gross revenue by vendor search, you may notice that Facebook has the highest revenue. You can drill down on vendor by item to find out which products contribute to those high sales. There is no limit to how deep you can drill down.

You can drill down from within the Answer Explorer view in a Liveboard. This allows you to use the back button to go back one step at a time, and to see the Answer fill your screen.

Liveboard Best Practices

Before you start consider:

• Who is your audience? are you creating a liveboard for yourself, your team, or for a presentation? understand your audience’s goals and decisions that need to be made

• Your flow - it is typically best to start with high level KPIs or metrics that speak to the goals of your discussion and then dive into supporting detail as necessary

• Make it actionable - this starts with know your business questions, goals, and KPIs. Ensure your arguments are supported clearly and concisely.

Building Your Liveboard:

• Less is More - not only can too many visualizations be overwhelming for your audience, it can be overwhelming for load times and costly to compute. Focus on critical information and use explore or drill down functionality to explore details. 10 to 15 answers is a good high-range target per tab.

• Avoid small visualization clusters - this can be overwhelming for an audience to consume and can increase load time as more answers are querying simultaneously on your liveboard.

• Avoid wide tabular charts - 5 to 8 columns is a good range for charts and pivot tables. Less is more here again as you add more columns, your metrics become less valuable. More columns also require more loading time and can require intra-scrolling within the answer.

• Avoid massive date ranges - keep your searches recent to load faster. If you need to do a longer historical comparison, consider breaking your time buckets into larger chunks (e.g. if you’re doing a 3 year comparison, consider quarterly time buckets for comparison rather than months).

• Use your tabs - if there’s just too much to share, utilize tab functionality to organize your data story, reduce load time, and increase focus for your audience(s).

• Use liveboard filters - setting filters on your liveboard is a great way to reduce querying time and focus your liveboard on the most pertinent information. Default time filters are a great way to enhance loading time for your boards.

• Strategically use column summaries - when including a table in your liveboard, consider whether or not column summaries are necessary for that answer. If they are not, it’s best to turn them off since it will increase querying time to calculate the summaries in addition to the rest of the content in the answer. If they are, consider what columns you actually need summaries for and, instead of turning summaries on for the entire table, select the necessary columns and turn on individual summaries (in the answer - edit chart configuration > configure > under ‘visible column’ click on the desired value > summary > select ‘display summary’)

For more details, check out this ThoughSpot community post.