Getting started modifying queries

In Zendesk Explore, you display your data in customizable reports, or queries. Your Explore pre-built dashboards already contain some pre-built queries; however, you might want to change how these queries represent your data or create new, custom queries.

While you can create new queries from scratch, in some cases it might be easier to customize the pre-built queries directly, for example if the pre-built query is measuring the data you need, but is not in the colors you want. With Explore, you can perform some common modifications to queries right from the dashboard.

Note: There are limitations to how you can customize queries on a dashboard. To change the chart type or apply additional calculations, you must edit the query in Query Builder (see Customizing queries).

This getting started article contains the following sections:

• Making editable copies of pre-built dashboards
• Customizing queries on pre-built dashboards
• Next steps

Making editable copies of pre-built dashboards

Explore's pre-built dashboards are view-only. To modify the queries, you must first clone the dashboard to make an editable copy. When you clone a dashboard, you also clone the queries and datasets associated with it.

Tip: This might result in a lot of cloned copies of queries being generated, making it more difficult to navigate your queries library. Understand how many queries you will create before you clone a dashboard.

You clone dashboards in the Dashboards library (), by selecting Clone from the Settings () drop-down list to the right of the dashboard name. For more information on cloning dashboards, see Cloning pre-built and shared dashboards.

Customizing queries on your dashboard

After you have duplicated your pre-built dashboard, you can customize the queries right from the cloned dashboard. If the customization option you need is not there, edit the query in Query Builder.

This section contains the following topics:

• Customization options
• Modifying your query
• Try it yourself: Customize a query from a pre-built dashboard

Customization options

You can modify queries on a pre-built dashboard in the following chart options. You can also find all of these chart options in the Chart configuration menu ().

• Chart: Edit options specific for individual visualizations (see Visualization types reference). The chart menu contains options for formatting your chart. If your chart does not have axes, you can edit text size here.
• Colors: Edit your chart text and result colors. If you are the account owner, you can set the default color in the Admin menu (see Editing Explore account settings).
• Display format: Change the formatting of your results to percentages, currency, timestamps, or custom formats. See Changing your result format for more information.
• Row Selector: If you added rows to your query, you can turn off, or configure the display of the row selector Explore generates.
• Legend: Edit the location, visibility, and colors of your legend.
• Datatips: Display information about your results when a user hovers over a data point (see Adding datatips to your query).
• Trend line: Add a trend line to your results or edit trend line settings (see Displaying a metric's results as a trend line).
• Applied filters: Edit any of the filter settings for the query.
• Visualization Selector: Add the Visualization Selector to your chart. The Visualization Selector permits users to toggle between different visualizations on a dashboard.
• Interactions: Enable or disable interactions (see Turning off dashboard and query interactivity).
• Drillthrough: Edit how you drill-in to your data in Explore (see Interacting with queries).
• Explosion: If you added attributes to Explosions, you can edit the query display settings (see Adding attributes to Explosions).

Customization options restricted to specific chart types:

• X axis, Y axis, Secondary axes: Edit axes settings, such as color, visibility, and label size. You can edit a secondary axes if you add a metric on a dual axis (see Adding a metric as a secondary axis).
• Columns: Edit the width, visibility, and alignment for table columns. For information on customizing tables, see Customizing tables.

Modifying your query

After you clone the pre-built dashboard, you can select a query to modify using any of the options listed above. For details, see Editing your query on a dashboard.

To customize a query on a dashboard, click the down arrow on the query's right corner, then select Edit configuration.

Note: If you select Edit query, you will be redirected to Query Builder to edit the query.

Example: Customize your query from a pre-built dashboard

This example shows how to customize the colors of the Ticket channel overview query on the Zendesk Support Overview pre-built dashboard. You can use the steps in this section for any query you want to modify.

To modify a query from a pre-built dashboard

1. Open your editable dashboard. See Making editable copies of pre-built dashboards for information.
2. Click the query you want to edit.
3. Click the down arrow in the upper right corner of the query.
4. Select Edit configuration. If you want to perform calculations or edit the query data, click Edit query.

   

5. Select the customization option you want to perform (see Customizing your chart). This example uses Colors.
6. Edit your query customization. This example changes the Chat attribute color to orange.

   

7. Click outside of the widget when finished.
8. After you finish editing your dashboard and queries, click Publish changes.

The dashboard is updated. For more information on publishing options see Sharing dashboards.

Next steps

• Getting started creating dashboards