How does the "Break out by..." function work?

We are currently trialing Metabase as our first foray into proper BI tooling for our organization and, needless to say as I am here posting, we're quite impressed with it thus far. I've been experimenting with the break out function, however, and find myself with some questions. Specifically, how are the columns which are available to select for break out chosen and can that list of available columns be customized in any way?

In the following example we want to break out by a "taken_by" column which is available in the primary data source this question uses but when we attempt to break out by that column it's simply not available in the list:


How can we surface the taken_by column as a break out option?

Thanks so much ahead of time for any consideration and assistance.

Hi, you should check the table metadata (settings admin table metadata). The categorical fields are the ones you can break out by

Hi Luiggi,

Ah ha! That was definitely it! Thank you very much :slightly_smiling_face: