Add column descriptions to visualizations

Feature Suggestions
1

Having column descriptions is great when building visualizations, but they are not visual to the end-user who consumes the report.

My suggestion is, that the description of the column shows up when you click on a field name used in a visualization.

This would help a lot for users who are not as familiar with the meaning of all of the fields.

2

Hi @mabr ,

Thank you for the suggestion.

I believe this is a valid use case since the visibility of fields and models’ descriptions are indeed helpful for your end-users to understand the meaning of a column or value in the report that they’re viewing.

I will let you know if we have any updates on this.

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3

This would be a massive help in our org, we’ve got lots of complex metrics and lots of non technical users - would really help our users have confidence when reading dashboards.

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4

Thanks for the feedback! We totally get how useful this would be for end users, and we’ve been trying to prioritize this as well.

We’re looking into how to make this work while keeping things customizable, secure, and well-governed. Would love to hear more about your specific needs to help us think through the design:

  • Do you ever have different descriptions internally vs. what you’d want business users to see?
  • Would you want descriptions on all fields, or just selected ones?
  • Should all business users see them, or would you need some control over who sees what?
  • Should the users on shareable links see descriptions too?

Really appreciate the input!

5

Interesting questions!

For us, the labels on dimensions and metrics are for end users not ourselves - AML/AQL/SQL users can see the true definition in code right there, and so don’t really need to label.

I’d like to see the descriptions on all fileds - but maybe it should be toggleable at a visualisation level, and default to off, so if someone has got labels that aren’t end user friendly they don’t get a nasty surprise when the feature launches!

Not sure on shareable links - I guess if they are toggleable at a visualisation level, then they should use that toggle.

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