Visualize & Present – Labguru

This article covers what to do once you have built a query: turning the results into charts, assembling those charts into interactive dashboards, and sharing what you have found with colleagues. It is a companion to Analyze & Build, which covers how to query and prepare your data in the first place.

How the pieces fit together

A visualization is a chart built from a single query in a workbook.
A dashboard is the presentation layer for a workbook. It arranges visualizations, text, filters, and controls onto a shared canvas so that several queries can be viewed together.
A viewer interacts with a finished dashboard through filters and controls, without needing to edit it.

What you can do depends on your permission:

Users with Access Dev Tools can build visualizations, create and edit dashboards, add filters and controls, and download or share content.
All other users can open dashboards, interact with them through filters and drilling, and download results.

Tasks reserved for administrators, such as managing organization-wide themes or default permissions, are outside the scope of this guide.

Dashboard access is controlled by sharing, not by row-level Labguru permissions. A viewer only sees dashboards that have been shared with them, but once shared, they see the full data the dashboard's queries return — there is currently no automatic filtering based on the viewer's own Labguru project or group membership. Share dashboards deliberately; see the note on data visibility and Organizing and Finding Content.

Creating visualizations

Every chart starts from a query, and there are two ways to get one:

From the assistant — describe what you want in plain English and the Analytics Assistant drafts the query and a result, which you can then chart.
Manually in a workbook — pick fields from the field picker and the query runs as you go. See Analyze & Build.

Once a query is returning results, you can present it as a visualization and fine-tune how it looks.

Choosing a chart type

Analytics includes a library of built-in chart types, so you can match the visualization to the question. Available types include:

Bar and area charts
Line charts
Pie and donut charts
Scatterplots and boxplots
Heatmaps and funnels
Sankey charts
KPIs and single-record displays
Maps
Tables
Markdown tiles for text and context

Configuring a chart

Each chart type offers configuration options — for how it maps fields to series, its axes, colors, sizing, and tooltips — from the Chart tab.

Adding a subtitle or description

When editing a chart you can add an optional subtitle and description to give viewers context. You can write these yourself, or have the assistant draft them for you and provide extra guidance to steer the result.

Tip. Keep chart titles and subtitles plain and specific. A viewer should be able to understand what a chart shows without opening the underlying query.

Building dashboards

A dashboard is the presentation layer for a workbook. You arrange queries, text, filters, and controls onto a shared canvas, group them into containers, and optionally split the dashboard across several pages. Viewers then interact with the result through filters and controls, without editing anything.

You can start a dashboard either way: ask the Analytics Assistant for a chart and add the result to a dashboard, or build your queries manually in a workbook and arrange them as tiles.

Creating and editing dashboards requires the Access Dev Tools permission. Viewers can open and explore dashboards but cannot edit them.

Creating and laying out a dashboard

A dashboard is built from a workbook, and the queries you built there become its chart tiles. You lay it out on a canvas, arranging tiles and adding text, filters and controls, and can split it across multiple pages.

Select a tile to adjust it inline — its title, chart type, and display settings — or open the underlying chart in its workbook for the full configuration.

If your dashboard has filters, a chart opened in its workbook may show different results, because dashboard filters are not applied to workbook queries.

Previewing before sharing

To check what a viewer will see before you publish, open the dashboard view while your changes are still in draft — you see the viewer experience without saving.

Dashboard filters and controls

Filters and controls are what make a dashboard interactive:

Filters narrow the data shown across the dashboard — for example a date range or a particular project. A filter can drive one field on one tile or map to different fields across several tiles.
Controls let a viewer change what a chart shows rather than narrowing the data — for example switching a date between daily, weekly and monthly, or toggling between two measures.

Both are added by a user with Access Dev Tools and are then available to viewers when they open the dashboard. Dashboards can also be set up so that filters narrow each other, and so that clicking on a chart filters the rest of the dashboard.

Caution. Hiding a filter is not a security measure — it only removes it from view, and anyone with access to the dashboard can still see the full underlying data. There is currently no automatic mechanism that restricts data within a shared dashboard based on the viewer's own Labguru permissions. The only real control is deciding who a dashboard is shared with in the first place.

Exploring dashboards

A finished dashboard is built to be explored. As a viewer you can narrow the data, follow a number down to the detail behind it, and read the underlying tables, all without changing the dashboard for anyone else.

You can also ask a question about this dashboard's data using the assistant button in the bottom-right corner — it is scoped to the dashboard you are viewing. See Analytics AI Assistant.

Filtering the view

Use the filters at the top of a dashboard to focus on what matters to you, for example a date range or a particular project. The dashboard updates as you change a filter. If a filter has an information icon next to it, hover over it to read a short explanation of what it does.

Some dashboards are set up so that filters narrow each other, so choosing a value in one filter limits the options in another.

Click-to-filter

On dashboards that have it enabled, you can filter the whole view by clicking directly on a chart. Click a bar, slice, or point to filter every compatible tile by that value. You can also:

Drag across a time or numeric axis to filter by a range.
Hold Ctrl (Windows) or Command (Mac) and click to add more values.

Active selections show as chips above the filters. Remove one by clicking the cross on its chip.

Drilling into detail

Where a chart or table supports it, you can drill from a summarized value into the rows behind it. Right-click a value, or open its context menu, to see the available drill options. This is the quickest way to answer “what makes up this number?” without building a new query.

Reading tables

Dashboard tables are read-only, but you can select and copy values from them to paste elsewhere, and right-click a cell to drill, filter, or copy. Editing, reordering columns, and adding calculations are only available in workbook tables, not on a dashboard.

Organizing and finding content

As your team builds more dashboards and workbooks, finding the right one quickly becomes important. Analytics organizes content with folders for structure and access, and labels for findability across folders.

Navigating the sidebar

Analytics Assistant — Ask questions about your data in plain English. See Analytics AI Assistant.
Routines — Prompts that run on a schedule, or when your data changes, and send you the result. See Analytics AI Assistant.
Skills — Reusable instructions for tasks you do often. See Analytics AI Assistant.
Favorites — The content you have starred. Add a favorite by clicking the star icon on any document or in a content list.
My documents — The documents and folders you have created. Share them to make them available to others.
Activity — Your recent work, so you can pick up where you left off.
Hub — Content shared with the whole organization.
Shared with me — Content shared directly with you.
Trash — Archived content, which can be restored by users with the right permissions.

Folders

Folders give your content a hierarchy and control who can access it. You might organize folders by team, by project, or by audience. A folder can hold both documents and subfolders.

Create a folder with Add folder in My documents or the shared Hub.
Move a folder from its options menu by choosing Move and selecting a destination.
Delete a folder from its options menu. A folder can only be deleted when it is empty.

When you share a folder, its access role cascades to everything inside it.

Cenevo prebuilt dashboards

Your organization's Hub includes a set of prebuilt dashboards published by Cenevo, covering common lab reporting needs. These are the fastest way to get started — see The fastest way to start. They are not directly editable. If you have the Access Dev Tools permission and want to adapt one, make a copy into your own account. Your copy is fully editable; the original stays intact in the Hub for everyone else to use as a starting point.

Giving viewers access to a dashboard

As a user with Access Dev Tools, you decide who can see the dashboards you build. Save the dashboard to a shared folder, or share the individual document, and give the people or groups a view role. They will then see it in Shared with me (or the Hub, if shared organization-wide). Viewers can open and explore what you share with them, but cannot edit it.

Share deliberately. Sharing a dashboard is currently a manual decision, and it is the only control over who sees its data. Once shared, a viewer sees the full result set the dashboard's queries return — there is no automatic filtering based on the viewer's own Labguru permissions, such as project or group membership. Before sharing, check that everyone on the list should be able to see everything the dashboard shows, not just that they should see the dashboard exists.

Labels

A document can only sit in one folder, but it is often relevant to several teams. Labels help here by tagging a document so the right people can find it, without copying it into multiple folders — for example by subject area (Inventory, Experiments) or working state (In progress).

Searching

When you know roughly what you are after, content search is the fastest route. Search looks across the content you have permission to see, so you can jump straight to a dashboard or workbook by name.

Tracking your activity

The Activity page records your recent work, making it easy to pick up where you left off.

Once you have an analysis or dashboard you want to pass on, you can download it or share it with colleagues. The options available depend on the abilities enabled for the document.

Downloading

From a workbook tab, download the query results — for example as CSV, Excel, or JSON.
From a dashboard, download the whole thing — for example as PDF, PNG, Excel, or CSV.

Sharing with colleagues

You share content with the people or groups who should see it by giving them access to the document or the folder it lives in. As a user with Access Dev Tools you control who can see what you build; Viewers can open and explore what is shared with them, but cannot edit it. See Giving viewers access to a dashboard.

Scheduled deliveries

Where the ability is enabled, content can be delivered on a schedule — for example a dashboard emailed to a group every Monday morning — so stakeholders stay up to date without opening and exporting it by hand.

Creating data alerts

An alert is different from a schedule: instead of sending a dashboard at a fixed time, an alert checks your data on a schedule and only delivers when a condition is met — for example, only when inventory for a reagent falls below a threshold, or only when a result changes from the last check. This keeps you from having to open a dashboard just to confirm nothing has changed.

Open a published dashboard, then choose File → Deliveries & Alerts.
Choose Alert as the delivery type, and select the tile or query the alert should watch.
Define the condition that must be met for the alert to fire, for example a value crossing a threshold, or the results having changed or stayed the same since the last check.
Set how often the condition should be checked, and choose a destination — for example email or Slack, where enabled.
Save the alert. It will now run silently in the background and only deliver when its condition is met.

On the very first check, an alert has nothing to compare against yet, so a “results have changed” or “results have stayed the same” condition will not fire. That first check simply establishes the baseline; the alert can trigger from the next scheduled check onward.

To confirm an alert is configured correctly without waiting for its condition to occur naturally, use Send Now from the alert's options menu once it has been saved. This checks the condition immediately: if it is not currently met, no delivery is sent, but you can confirm the alert ran.