Dashboards

Dashboards in Obvious let you create live views of your sheet data using charts and text blocks in one place. Use a dashboard to track metrics, monitor changes in real time, and share a visual summary of workbook data without rebuilding charts by hand.

Dashboards live in your project alongside workbooks, documents, and other artifacts. They're built from rows of blocks: each block is either a chart or a block of formatted text. You arrange them top to bottom, and within each row you arrange them side by side.

How dashboards work

Every chart in a dashboard pulls data from a specific sheet. When someone edits a record, imports new data, or makes any change to that sheet, the chart reflects it immediately — no refresh, no manual update. The connection is live.

Text blocks sit alongside charts in the same row. Use them for headings, context, summaries, or callouts — anything that helps the reader understand what they're looking at.

Create a dashboard

You can ask the agent to create a dashboard for you. Describe what you want to see — which sheets, which metrics, what layout — and the agent will build it.

Dashboards are also created automatically when the agent produces visualizations as part of a larger analysis task.

What a dashboard contains

A dashboard is made up of rows. Each row holds one or more blocks placed side by side, with each block's width set as a percentage of the row.

Chart blocks connect to a sheet and render one of the supported chart types.

Text blocks contain markdown — headings, body copy, bullet lists, bold text, links.

A row can hold a single chart that spans the full width, or a mix of text and charts split across the row.

Supported chart types

Chart type	Best for
Bar	Comparing values across categories
Line	Trends over time
Area	Cumulative or stacked trends
Pie	Proportions across a small number of categories
Donut	Same as pie, with grouping and aggregation
Scatter	Correlations between two numeric fields
Radar	Multi-axis comparisons (up to 8 dimensions)

Connect a chart to a sheet

Every chart block points to a sheet via its sheet ID. You then specify which field maps to the x-axis and which to the y-axis. The chart renders all rows from that sheet and updates in real time as the sheet changes.

For charts that show individual rows across many categories — bar, line, area — you set an x-field and a y-field directly. No grouping required.

Summarize data with groupBy and aggregation

For charts where you want to collapse rows into summary totals — donut and radar charts in particular — you can group by a field and apply an aggregation function.

For example: group by Status and aggregate by sum of Revenue to get one bar per status with total revenue. The supported aggregation functions are sum, average, count, minimum, and maximum.

Tip: Donut charts work best with eight or fewer distinct values in the groupBy field. Radar charts are automatically capped at eight spokes.

View a dashboard

Dashboards appear in your project's artifact list alongside your other artifacts. Open one by clicking its name.

If the agent created a dashboard as part of a conversation, Obvious navigates you to it automatically when it's ready.

Dashboards vs. documents with charts

Both dashboards and documents can display visualizations alongside text. The difference is how charts connect to data.

Dashboard charts are live — they read directly from a sheet and update in real time. Document charts are embedded as static files generated by the agent at a point in time. To update a document chart, the agent needs to regenerate it.

Use a dashboard when the underlying data is actively changing and you want the visualization to stay current. Use a document when you're producing a report or analysis that captures a snapshot — something meant to be read as a finished piece rather than monitored over time.