Hello team Metabase! My company has been using metabase for a while now and have found it an excellent platform for our needs. But recently we've moved from just having it sitting on top of our data warehouse, to starting to use it heavily for building reports/dashboards for automated reporting, monitoring, and analysis of our data. And we've been struggling a bit with the display of said reports/dashboards.
I'm hoping, that maybe, there's just a few things we don't fully understand in the featureset. But we are concerned that instead it's just some limitations of the software. (and before I continue, I should state that I do understand that customized color schemes is a Pro/Enterprise thing)
Dashboards w/ Tables & "Extra Space"
So one frustration has been when trying to make a dashboard that has a lot of just table/reports in it (for example to replicate some financial reporting that might normally be in Excel/Google) ... that it seems hard to actually line these up to render well. In particular, the height of the table reports. For example we can have a table that is always 4 rows of data, plus header, plus title. And that fits nicely in 4 vertical 'boxes' of a dashboard. Except when it doesn't? It will appear to fit fine. But then you'll reload the page, and metabase will decide that the 4th row needs to be pushed off onto another page/screen with a nav bar. But if you then widen/narrow/widen the screen to make it resize back to the original size the window was at. Suddenly it fits perfectly again w/o pagination. and will show nicely that way. Until you reload the page completely again in which case it will once again think that it needs pagination. The only solution to this appears to be giving every report at least 1 extra vertical block of space. But that ends up making the reports really awkward versus a nice condensed dashboard. Is there no way to lock reports to better 'fit to size'?
A related (and less annoying, but) issue is when you have tables that might render best at different widths. So one that has 7 columns and one that has 12. You can set them up with blank space to the right of the 7 column one. But then as you shrink/grow the width of the screen, it might get more squished than it needed to. Honestly what would be useful there would be the ability to have a report marked NOT for it to go 'full width'. But for the table to render like it would when viewing the report directly, where each column only takes the width it needs. Versus being force-stretched wide in the dashboard. Is there a hidden option for 'render table full-width' vs 'render table naturally'?
Table Formatting in General
A lot of the tabular reports end up being rather hard to read on a dashboard, due to a lack of easy formatting. The lines between the rows being onlyrgba(238, 236, 236, 0.3)ends up being invisible on any monitor with brightness turned up fairly high. Also while conditional formatting exists (and yes, the Pro/Enterprise color scheme changes) ... it feels surprising that simple options like "highlight alternate rows" doesn't exist to help get some easier-to-read visual effects applied. So again, hoping we are just missing that somewhere? And/or is there a way to insert our own CSS files to modify some of these things?
Table Header text
This is probably less a "does this exist" and more a "yeah I think this doesn't exist but it would be nice". It's nice that you can change the column headers in a table for a report. And it's separately nice that you can use variables in some cases in text displays. It would be nice to combine those. IE: If I could change the title of a column from being 'Last Month' to beingselect to_char(current_date, 'YYYY Month')
Mini-bar-charts in tables
In general we love this feature! It's a great way to take tabular data reports and add a little graphing into them. In particular we have been adding them to percentage formatted fields to get a nice visual of that %. However the one thing we realized after the fact was that even though you have a field formatted as %. The mini-bar doesn't take that into account. And the mini-bar doesn't let you set a min/max value for what it considers empty/full. So if your data has at most 65% in a field. And at minimum 20%. Then the 20% looks empty. And the 65% looks full. Which defeats the purpose in this sense. Is there any way to tell the mini-bar-chart what the min/max values it should be rendering against are? Like you can with conditional formatting for example?
Email Reports
I see someone else recently posted about this as well, so I won't go deep. But we were really hoping to rely on sending the email versions of dashboards. But are now finding that these really don't render well at all. It would be great if it was possible to mark some parts of the thing to 'not render in email'. Or just to render differently. We are considering changing the 'emailed' report to be a differently formatted one. But then the link to the report wouldn't be to the 'formatted' version.
Text (Number) rendering (size)
One final thing I was trying to find and couldn't. Is the ability to control how 'Number' visualizations render. We are trying to use in a couple places the number visualization as a way to show (well) numbers, but also any piece of data we want. As you can have single field of text rendered as a 'number' visualization. However it appears that you can't control the size of the font in these blocks? Also they can't be any smaller than 3 rows tall? which makes it hard to try to use them to put some custom-dynamic-text headers basically in place (which is what we were trying to do) without major vertical space being taken up.
again overall, we love the software and than you for working hard to provide it. Just trying to understand what controls we do have to make better formatted reports going forward. And what we don't.