Welcome to our comprehensive FAQ guide for Insights! This document aims to provide clear answers to common questions, empowering you to navigate, analyze, and maximize the potential of Insights reporting.
Whether you're a seasoned user or just getting started, these FAQs should offer helpful tips and troubleshooting solutions to enhance your experience with Insights' powerful data visualization capabilities.
Insights is a data visualization tool that provides program administrators with the ability to move beyond flat file exports, to visually explore their data in an agile and interactive manner. With Insights, you can tell fact-based stories, answer questions, and analyze the trends you care most about.
Please reference the related Insights Overview article to learn more.
Is Insights secure?
Insights leverages two industrial-strength cloud platforms, Looker and Snowflake. These two companies take the security of your data as seriously as we do, so please see the following links for more information on the safeguards built into these technologies.
A short setup exercise will take place, and during that time CyberGrants will provide you access to an Insights self-paced e-learning course. An Implementation consultant will then work with you to complete your initial setup and answer questions about the platform.
Please reference the related Insights Standard Package Offering article to learn more about the full onboarding & support process for Insights.
How do I access Insights?
CyberGrants users will access Insights as they have with any other Admin module. Once you are onboarded, a new “Insights” tab will be visible next to the tabs you are accustomed to seeing. Once a user accesses this tab they will be able to explore and interact with the data within an intuitive user interface.
Is data immediately updated?
Insights is near-real time and is currently updating new and existing records every 2 hours.
What if I have already been onboarded but would like additional Insights training for myself or my team?
What levels of access are available within Insights?
Insights offers two levels of access: Analyst or Viewer.
Please reference the related User Permissions Matrix article to learn more about the specific capabilities of each access level.
How do I add or remove users for Insights?
Administrators can utilize the Self-Service User Management portal to add or remove Insights users from their company's account. Please submit a request to your primary support contact at help@cybergrants.com if further support is needed. Be sure to indicate the user name & email address, as well as their level of access (Analyst/Viewer)
How can I enable Proposal Type Security within Insights?
If you leverage Proposal Type Security within Admin, these limitations can also be enabled within Insights. This will prevent users from seeing data related to any proposal types to which their assigned User Role does not have access.
Please submit a ticket to your primary support contact at help@cybergrants.com who can then route the request to the Insights team as needed.
How do I make changes to one of the standard dashboards?
Easy! Just click the "Copy" icon (which resembles two pieces of paper) next to any standard dashboard to make it your own by saving it to your Group or Personal folder. Please reference the article on Dashboards Overviewfor more information.
The standard dashboards are designed to help you get started on your data visualization journey and provide a best practice framework for common use cases that we have heard from other users. However, we also know how important custom fields can be when telling your CSR story. Because of this, we have built all of our standard dashboards to serve as a template for your own program analysis.
Please reference the article on related Standard Dashboards to see a full list of our available standard dashboards.
How do I begin to build a report or dashboard?
When building a dashboard or report from scratch (and not leveraging one of the standard dashboards), it's important to first determine the exact question(s) you are looking to answer and the audience(s) for which they are intended. This will then help to determine the correct Explore to start with, the filters that should be applied to limit the data set, and the specific fields (standard or custom) that are most important in answering your most prioritized questions.
Please reference the related Analyze Basics article for more detailed information.
What types of fields can I access in Insights?
We currently support the following standard and custom data fields:
Currency
Date
Number
Text
Paragraph
Yes/No Value
Single-Select List
Multi-Select List
Percentage List
Read-Only Field
Checkbox List
User-Defined List
Summable Number List
Summable Currency List
Metric List
FX Currency
Summable FX Currency List
Worksheet
Please reference the related Data Field Types article for more information.
What types of fields are not supported within Insights?
Long Paragraph Fields (CLOB)
File Attachment Fields (BLOB)
Why am I not able to locate a specific field?
If you have a field that you are unable to locate within Insights, first check the following:
Has the field been published to Production?
Is the field set to Active?
Does the field have data tied to it?
If the answer to all of these is "Yes", please submit a support ticket to your primary support contact at help@cybergrants.com who can help provide additional guidance or route the issue to the Insights team as needed.
How many tiles can I have on a dashboard?
A dashboard should not exceed 25 tiles. It's important to remember that each tile on a dashboard is essentially a separate report that is running. Having a single dashboard running 25+ reports at the same time will cause longer load times or even errors on the dashboard.
The purpose of a dashboard is to provide quick and easy access to key metrics and insights. By presenting information in a clear and concise manner, you enable users to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently.
How can I add custom text to my dashboard?
Adding custom text to your dashboard can be a great way to provide additional clarity about how your end users should leverage the dashboard.
You can add text to the dashboard in the following ways (when in Edit mode):
Click Add > Text to add a Text tile that can be placed anywhere on the dashboard
Click the ellipses on a single dashboard tile and select Add Note to display additional details related to a specific tile
You also have the ability to rename filters, tiles, and data fields being shown within a visualization.
Please reference the related Create a Dashboard article for more information about adding custom text.
I am seeing a warning message that says "Row limit reached. Results may be incomplete." What does that mean?
By default, the data table will be limited to 500 rows, but this can be increased to 5,000 rows as needed.
Note: Even if the data table has been limited to not include all rows of data, any aggregations, counts, or average measures will still be incorporating the full data set.
Please reference the related Insights Analyze Basics Overview article to learn more about adjusting the data table when building a report.
What is the best way to visualize multiple measure fields at the same time?
If utilizing multiple Measure fields within the data table, it's best to use the "Donut Multiples" visualization type. This will allow for the aggregation of totals, and the ability to see the percentage (%) across all applicable records. Common Example: Custom List fields.
Please reference the related Visualization Types to learn more about the available visualization options.
What are additional ways to optimize Insights performance?
Limit the number of elements within an individual dashboard. There is no precise rule for defining the number because the design of each element impacts memory consumption based on a variety of factors; however, dashboards with 25 or more tiles tend to be problematic when it comes to performance.
Use post-query processing features, such as merge results, custom fields, and table calculations, sparingly. These features are intended to be used as proofs of concept and it is best practice to hardcode any frequently used calculations and functions directly within your data model.
Download or deliver queries using the All Results option sparingly, as some queries can be very large and overwhelm the server when processed.
Filters
Is it required to add a filter to a report or dashboard?
While adding a filter is not required, it is best practice to always at least include a "Date" filter, so you are limiting your data set to a specific period of time to avoid running a report for all time. From there, you can always expand or limit your date field selections as needed.
Note: With that being said, we do not recommend using two different types of "Date" fields as filters at the same time, as this can result in records being unintentionally excluded.
Please reference the related Create a Dashboard article for more information about adding and editing dashboard filters.
Why do my tiles not update when I adjust a filter?
As more tiles or filters are added to an existing dashboard, it's important to make sure that your filters are always updating the intended tiles. We'd recommend periodically checking the "Tiles to Update" tab within the Filter edit menu of a dashboard. To check this:
Edit the dashboard
Edit the filter
Click the "Tiles to Update" tab
Make sure all tiles are (or aren't) updating as desired
Please reference the related Create a Dashboard article for more information about adding and editing dashboard filters.
Should I build a separate dashboard for each user segment?
Our recommendation would be to consider leveraging a variety of dashboard filters on a single dashboard as opposed to building separate dashboards. Filters allow many different audiences to utilize the same dashboard to then limit the data set to fit their specific needs. This can help to limit an excessive amount of dashboards, which can help to alleviate user confusion.
Please reference the related Create a Dashboard article for more information about adding and editing dashboard filters.
When is it best to use a dashboard filter vs filtering within a specific tile?
In most cases, it's best to use dashboard filters as opposed to filtering each individual tile. This will allow dashboard users to temporarily adjust filters for their own use case, and have all applicable tiles be updated at once. Conversely, if there are filters that you do not want your end users to adjust, then filtering within each specific tile would be best.
How should I filter on a Multi-Select field type?
When filtering on a multi-select field type, it's best to use the "contains" operator. Using the "contains" operator will ensure that you capture all options that contain one or more words. Note: When using the "contains" operator, keep in mind that the search fields are case-sensitive.
Please reference the related Dashboard Overview article to learn more about utilizing filter operators on a dashboard.
