Getting started modifying reports

Explore displays your data in customizable reports. The Explore prebuilt dashboards contain many reports for common business scenarios, but you might want to change these reports to suit your own needs, or create brand new reports.

While you can create new reports from scratch, in some cases it might be easier to customize the prebuilt reports directly, for example if the prebuilt report is measuring the data you need, but is not in the colors you want. With Explore, you can perform some common modifications to reports right from the dashboard.

Note: There are limitations to how you can customize reports on a dashboard. To change the chart type or apply additional calculations, you must edit the report in the report builder (see Customizing reports).

This getting started article contains the following sections:

• Making editable copies of prebuilt dashboards
• Customizing reports on prebuilt dashboards
• Next steps

Making editable copies of prebuilt dashboards

Explore's prebuilt dashboards are view-only. To modify the reports, you must first clone the dashboard to make an editable copy. When you clone a dashboard, you also clone the reports and datasets associated with it.

Tip: This action might result in a lot of cloned copies of reports being generated, making it more difficult to navigate your Reports library. Understand how many reports you will create before you clone a dashboard.

To clone a prebuilt dashboard

• In the Dashboards library (), select Clone from the Settings () drop-down list to the right of the dashboard name.

For more information, see Cloning dashboards.

Customizing reports on your dashboard

After you have duplicated your pre-built dashboard, you can customize the reports right from the cloned dashboard. If the customization option you need is not there, edit the report in the report builder.

This section contains the following topics:

• Customization options
• Modifying your report
• Example: Customize your report from a prebuilt dashboard

Customization options

You can modify reports on a prebuilt dashboard in the following chart options. You can also find all of these chart options in the Chart configuration menu ().

• Chart: Edit options specific for individual visualizations (see Visualization types reference). The chart menu contains options for formatting your chart. If your chart does not have axes, you can edit text size here.
• Colors: Edit your chart text and result colors. If you are the account owner, you can set the default color in the Admin menu (see Editing Explore account settings).
• Display format: Change the formatting of your results to percentages, currency, timestamps, or custom formats. See Changing your result format for more information.
• Row selector: If you added rows to your report, you can turn off, or configure the display of the row selector Explore generates.
• Legend: Edit the location, visibility, and colors of your legend.
• Datatips: Display information about your results when a user hovers over a data point (see Adding datatips to your report).
• Trend line: Add a trend line to your results or edit trend line settings (see Displaying a metric's results as a trend line).
• Applied filters: Edit any of the filter settings for the report.
• Visualization selector: Add the visualization selector to your chart. This enables viewers to toggle between different visualizations on the dashboard.
• Interactions: Enable or disable interactions (see Turning off dashboard and report interactivity).
• Drill in: Edit how you drill into your data in Explore (see Using drill in to refine your reports).
• Explosion: If you added attributes to Explosions, you can edit the report display settings (see Adding attributes to Explosions).

Customization options restricted to specific chart types:

• X axis, Y axis, Secondary axes: Edit axes settings, such as color, visibility, and label size. You can edit a secondary axes if you add a metric on a dual axis (see Adding a metric as a secondary axis).
• Columns: Edit the width, visibility, and alignment for table columns. For information on customizing tables, see Customizing tables.

Modifying your report

After you clone the pre-built dashboard, you can select a report to modify using any of the options listed above. For details, see Editing your report on a dashboard.

To customize a report on a dashboard, click the down arrow on the report's right corner, then select Edit configuration.

Note: If you select Edit report, you will be redirected to the report builder to edit the report.

Example: Customize your report from a prebuilt dashboard

This example shows how to customize the colors of the Ticket channel overview report on the Zendesk Support prebuilt dashboard. You can use the steps in this section for any report you want to modify.

To modify a report from a prebuilt dashboard

1. Open your editable dashboard. See Making editable copies of prebuilt dashboards for information.
2. Click the report you want to edit.
3. Click the down arrow in the upper right corner of the report.
4. Select Edit configuration. If you want to perform calculations or edit the report data, click Edit report.

   

5. Select the customization option you want to perform (see Customizing your chart). This example uses Colors.
6. Edit your report customization. This example changes the Chat attribute color to orange.

   

7. Click outside of the widget when finished.
8. After you finish editing your dashboard and reports, click Publish changes.

The dashboard is updated. For more information on publishing options see Sharing dashboards.

Next steps

• Getting started creating dashboards