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General Explore frustrations...
Posted Jun 07, 2021
So this has been like this for over a year and still Explore can be pretty frustrating. The fact that you can not Discard Changes is crazy. If you make any changes while in the editor it's there even if you do not want it. If you bulk change something like a move, then Undo undoes the move one by one, which kinda makes sense but also can be annoying. The sizing of things is also frustrating. For instance...
Why is there all the wasted space in there? If i move the legend to the right the graph gets bigger, but there is still a two grid open space at the bottom. Is there a way to change that?
Why do the text boxes have to be so big? This is 'normal' size text and if i make the box any smaller it sticks a scroll bar on the box even though the text fits just fine.
This just makes everything a mess when you are trying to organize any dashboard unless you make everything huge. Explore vs GoodData.
Is there a standard grid size that should be used to make this work/look better? You can't change the date/time filter size at all (that i have found) so grid size 1 is really messy. Mostly because you have to have a box 2 boxes in order not to see a scroll bar. A size 2 grid seems to work best, but I am open to others observations about dashboard creation and sizing. Page size is also giving me headaches as it seems to work much different in Explore. Most things seem to be doubled in size from what i can see.
But short of making a copy of a dashboard/tab before you make any changes so you can delete the tab and start over if you have to we need this back in some fashion sooner rather than later... I know there is a thread on this that is over a year old with little response. This should have been in there from the very start.
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10 comments
Official
John Costello
Hi Ed, CJ,
Thank you so much for your feedback, we really get your frustrations. I wanted to provide a little context on Explore first, our journey to date has been about integrating and moving our customers over to our new Reporting tool for Zendesk - Explore!
Now we are in the next phase of our journey and one we hope you will join us on. In 2022 we will be releasing new versions of both our Dashboard Builder and our Query Builder which will be addressing a lot of what you have set out in this thread.
With a brand new layout for the Dashboard Editor giving more precise control on the canvas to the user and less wasted whitespace. We will also be introducing Templates which will help users get started quicker with premade queries and layouts for the dashboard. These are only some of the early things we plan to release with loads more to come.
Dashboard Builder will be going into Open beta early next year and we would love Ed Ball to have your insights into how we are doing and whether we are addressing/not addressing your frustrations.
We are really excited to be making an impact in these areas next year and we really value our customers insights into how we can make things better.
I hope this helps shed some light on where things are going and when you can expect to see some change in these areas.
Regards
John Costello
Explore Product
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Lucia Johnson Seller
I recommend grid size 0 to make the dashboard look cleaner and match the background color so that you don't have to worry about grid sizes.
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CJ Johnson
Super agreed! The use of screen real estate and bad swaths of white space is particularly brutal if you work off a laptop screen. Most of my screen is taken up by white space, and inevitably I don't have enough room left to maneuver my charts into spots.My big tip for setting up and beautifying Dashboards, is to zoom out to 65%, do what you need to do, then zoom back in.
While the "0 grid" trick helps a bit, it removes the ability to use the grid to line things up, which is pretty essential if you have really terrible spacial skills. The grid line pop ups when you drag charts around are probably the only thing keeping my reports from being embarrassingly ugly/me spending an eternity sweating and squinting and drawing a line between the objects with my finger on the screen.
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Ed Ball
I have some extra frustrations to add to this...
In insights you could email out specific tabs instead of the entire dashboard. We have a daily report that goes out, but we also have sections of that Daily dashboard that are sent to specific teams so they are given data they need and do not have to look for it. Explore does not do that. If you want to do that you have to edit the dashboard, click the tab, click clone, click 'in another dashboard', uncheck clone queries, then click clone. Insights was much more user friendly as far as that goes. Not the mention the bloat of the queries by themselves.
The other is very similar, you can not just schedule a query to be sent out as an email. You have to put it on a dashboard in order to send it out and that just pollutes the dashboards area. Frustrating that you can't just email out the report/query. I kinda get it, but still a little frustrating.
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Ed Ball
Inline messages:
You can't do this in explore report scheduling. Is there any report that will allow a ticket to be clicked on and open it in Zendesk? I can do this in explore if you are actually looking at the report, but there is no way to do this when scheduling a report to be sent out?
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Ed Ball
Hello John,
I certainly look forward to trying out any and all changes to Explore. I do like Explore, it's just not a great user experience and gets really frustrating.
I have actually started making copies of the Main dashboards after any changes are made just in case something happens to them when working on changes.
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Lucia Johnson Seller
Hi Onur Olmez Have you tried doing a chart where:
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CJ Johnson
@... This thread is marked "planned", but the new Dashboard builder is still in "beta" which renders it unusable as many necessary features have not been implemented. It also does not fix the spacing inside widgets. No new "Query builder" was released in 2022. Can you speak to where these projects are at?
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John Costello
Hi CJ,
Thanks for your comment and prompt for an update. The new Dashboard Builder is indeed still in Beta and we are learning lots on how our customers are interacting with the new Builder. We have most recently released the ability to add Historical Queries and Filters, Historical Templates and updated how new Dashboards are shared by Editors.
We are currently working on the ability to allow Editors to apply restrictions to dashboards that will empower editors to build a single dashboard and tailor it to different audiences and are very excited about that hitting the Beta for our customers to try. With more features to come off the back of that update.
We will also open up our Dashboard builder Beta to our Professional Customers soon after that update with a view of getting a wider set of feedback on the new Builder. Our plan is to GA the Dashboard Builder in 2023.
Our new Report Builder (formally Query builder) was due to go into Beta in late 2022 and the team have been working hard to achieve this however in order to ensure a great Report Builder Beta experience the team have decided delay the Beta launch until the first half of 2023.
In the new Beta Report Builder customers will get to work with a new simplified Builder experience with all the power of our Legacy Report Builder. The Beta will provide a simple way to create reports helping users distil insights from their Zendesk data faster.
Sneak peek of our new Report Builder
I hope this helps give some insight into where the projects are at and what you can expect to come.
Regards
John Costello
Explore Product
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CJ Johnson
Hi John,
Thanks, but the pinned note at the top is still very misleading and referring to dates that have long passed. I'm pretty disappointed to see that you intend to not address any of these issues with the existing Dashboard builder or Dashboards that were made with them. This puts the onus on your customers to eventually have to rebuild every single Dashboard in your new tool, changing all links and breaking all existing workflows, to get bug fixes that frankly should have been addressed in the original product. That's literally hundreds of hours of work, and at this point, I'm inclined to tell people to use literally any other tool for reporting. We have no way to build Dashboards with the features we need, that will also be supported going forward, that's a bad situation.
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