Creating Dashboards

Dashboards in Ballast are created from chat conversations. Ask questions, get visualizations, and save them as reusable dashboards.

Creating a Dashboard

1. Start a Chat

Navigate to a collection and open the Chat interface. Ask a question that involves data:

Show me monthly revenue for the past year

What are our top 10 customers by order value?

Compare support ticket volume by category

2. Review the Visualization

Ballast analyzes your data and generates appropriate charts. You can:

• Ask follow-up questions
• Request different chart types
• Refine the data selection

3. Save as Dashboard

When you have charts you want to keep:

1. Click Save as Dashboard
2. Give it a name
3. The conversation becomes a dashboard

Chart Types

Ballast can generate various chart types:

Type	Best For
Line	Trends over time
Bar	Category comparisons
Pie	Part-to-whole
Area	Volume over time
Scatter	Correlations
Horizontal Bar	Ranked lists
Stacked Bar	Composition over categories

The AI selects appropriate chart types based on your data, but you can request specific types:

Show me that as a bar chart instead

Dashboard Layout

After creating a dashboard, you can:

• Rearrange charts by dragging
• Resize charts
• Remove charts you don’t need

Adding More Charts

To add charts to an existing dashboard:

1. Open the dashboard
2. Continue the conversation
3. New charts are added automatically

Best Practices

Be specific about data

• Name columns, tables, or fields
• Specify date ranges
• Mention aggregations (sum, average, count)

Ask iteratively

• Start with a simple query
• Refine based on results
• Add filters as needed

Use natural language

• “Show revenue by month”
• “What’s the trend in support tickets?”
• “Compare Q3 vs Q4 sales”