After a good conversation you often want to hand someone a dashboard to check each week, or a write-up of what you found. In Crunch you make that from the message box: type /dashboard, /report or /plan, and Crunch opens a real dashboard or doc with a chat of its own beside it. Each message you send in that chat works on the page next to it. We call the dashboard or doc, together with its chat, a piece.
What you’ll need
- A chat. Data is optional to start, but a dashboard or report built on your numbers needs data attached; see Datasets.
- A plan that includes dashboards or docs; see pricing.
Make one
- In the message box, type / and choose Dashboard, Report or Plan. You can type words after it, such as
/report weekly sales by channel, and they become the first thing asked and the title. - The piece opens with its chat on the left and the page beside it. On a phone, the page is a sheet over the chat: use the Show the dashboard or Hide the report button in the header (the word follows what you’re making) to open and close it.
- Keep talking. In a dashboard, each message adds or changes its tiles. In a report, each message writes or rewrites it.
What each command makes:
- Dashboard — tiles that stay current. It starts empty; its chat fills it.
- Report — a doc, with figures from your data.
- Plan — a doc titled “Plan: …” that works out the steps for a big question (what each needs, and what isn’t known yet) and does none of them until you say. Say what to plan after it:
/plan why did revenue drop, and which channels should we cut. Edit the plan by talking to its chat, then ask it to go ahead.
Go back to the chat it came from
When you start a piece from a chat, that chat shows a card where the piece was made, marked “started from this chat”. Click it, or Open, to return to the piece. The piece’s chat begins with that conversation’s questions, answers and rows already in hand, so you needn’t explain again. In the other direction, Back to the chat in the piece’s header returns you to where you started.
Place charts you already have
If the chat drew charts or tables, the piece shows Already counted in the chat, with a count. Open it to see each one with its row count. Click Add as tile on a dashboard, or Add to doc on a doc, to place it as it is, using the rows already counted rather than counting again. It says Added when it’s there, or why it couldn’t be.
You can also do this from a chart in a chat; see Charts, tables and artifacts.
Publish or share
The page beside the chat shows without its toolbar, so it stays uncluttered while you work. Click Publish or share in the header to bring the toolbar back (Publish, Share, Versions, PDF), and Hide the toolbar to put it away. Publishing and sharing work as described in Publish and share a data story and Publish a dashboard. Nobody else sees a piece until you publish and share it.
Find your pieces again
They are listed in the Library, and on the page of the workspace or agent they were made in.
How to tell it worked
The piece opens with its title in the header, the page beside the chat, and, if you started it from a chat, a card for it in that chat.
Good to know
- Leave the piece, keep the piece. The cross on the chip in the message box (for example “Report”) returns you to an ordinary chat; the piece is kept.
- A dashboard chart draws a dataset’s rows as they are. Charting raw orders by channel draws every order. Ask the chat for the figure you want counted, and it will sum it for you.
- Agents can make pieces too. An agent can be set to make nothing, a report, a dashboard, or both; see Agents.
Related
- The + and / menus in the message box — the other commands.
- Library — every dashboard and doc in one list.
- Publish a dashboard — tiles, filters and sharing.
- Sheets — pivot, chart and ask the co-pilot.