Design and edit a dashboard

Add text, shapes, callouts, links and images to a dashboard, place charts where you want them, edit a chart's title and subtitle in place, select and edit several objects at once, open a chart in the full editor, and undo changes one dashboard at a time.

7 min readUpdated October 26, 2026

A dashboard is a designed page, not just a grid of charts. The canvas takes text, shapes, images and narrative components alongside your visualizations, and each object carries its own styling.

Add objects to the board

The toolbar above the canvas has three add buttons: Add text, Add shape, and Add Component. You can also right-click an empty part of the canvas. Whatever you pick from the right-click menu is placed where you clicked, not at the bottom of the board.

Add Chart - a new chart to configure.
Copy Existing Chart - a copy of one of your Analyze sheets. The submenu shows each sheet with a thumbnail, and Browse all charts opens the full list.
Add Container - an empty row or column to hold other objects.
Add Filter - a filter control for the board.
Add Text, Add Shape, Add Component, and Add Image.
Copy image and Download PNG - a picture of the whole dashboard.

Titles and text

The Add text button offers two things: Text for body copy, and Title for a page heading. A Title arrives pre-sized as a large bold heading on a transparent card, so it reads as a title without you formatting one from scratch.

Block styles - Normal text, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and Inline code.
Highlight - a swatch picker offering None, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Red, and Orange.
Vertical align - Top, Middle, or Bottom within the box.
Appearance - Background, Border and its width, corner radius, Padding, and a Shadow of None, Small, Medium, Large, or Extra large.

Shapes

Add shape offers Rectangle, Circle, Triangle, Diamond, Hexagon, Pentagon, Star, Octagon, Plus, Line, and Arrow. Use them for grouping, dividing, and pointing - a rectangle behind a cluster of cards does more for a reader than another chart.

Callouts, annotations, and links

Add Component brings in narrative pieces: Callout, Annotation, Hero, and Link. These carry the writing that turns a set of charts into an argument.

Callout - a bordered card with a heading, a claim, and supporting detail. A new callout is filled in with a generated observation from your data rather than arriving blank.
Annotation - a lighter note, seeded with the title "Note".
Hero - a large headline block.
Link - a clickable button. Its action is either Link, which opens a web address in a new tab, or Navigate, which switches to another dashboard in the same analysis.

To have Golden write the copy for you, select a callout or hero card and open the Text section of the Format panel. The sparkle button next to a text field is Generate with AI. Source chart chooses what the writing is about: its default, Whole dashboard, draws on the values every chart on the board actually shows, so it follows the board's current filters; pick a single chart and the copy is written from that one instead. Golden waits for a chart that is still loading before it reads it, so the copy won't name a value the chart doesn't display.

Note: While you edit, clicking a link button only selects it, so you can move and style it. The link or navigation runs when someone views or presents the dashboard.

Tip: Write the callout before you polish the charts. If you cannot state the finding in a sentence, the board does not have one yet, and no amount of formatting will supply it.

Add an image

Drag an image file from your computer straight onto the canvas and it lands where you drop it. You can also right-click the canvas and choose Add Image, then drop a file on the box, click it to browse, or paste a web address into Enter image URL and click Add from URL. Image files can be up to 10 MB.

An image arrives at its own proportions as a card, so it flows and reorders with your charts like any other tile. Click it to select the card and its toolbar appears: Object Fit (Cover, Contain, or Fill), Fit to image to restore the picture's true proportions after a resize, Replace Image, and Shadow & padding.

Place charts where you want them

When you drag a chart or a field onto the board, a gold line shows where the new chart will go - between two tiles, or at the edge of a row or column. Drop it there and the chart is inserted at that spot. Dropping onto an existing chart offers Replace instead.

Click a chart to select it, and its toolbar appears above the card. Selecting another chart moves the toolbar to it, and clicking the selected chart again - or an empty part of the canvas - closes it. What appears depends on the chart, but you will usually see these:

Configure - change the chart type and fields.
Format - open the chart's formatting.
Forecast - turn on a forecast for the chart.
Filters - opens Chart filters, the filters that apply to this chart only. Click Add and choose Value or Top / Bottom, then pick a field.
Explain Chart - a written explanation of what the chart shows.
Analyze - open the chart in the full Analyze editor.
Export CSV - on tables, download the rows.
Ask AI to change this chart - describe a change in plain words.

Right-click a chart for Configure, Format Chart, Explain this chart, Add Annotation, Duplicate, View SQL, Bring to Front, and Send to Back. These same actions also sit on a More (⋯) button at the end of the chart's toolbar. View SQL opens a dialog showing the SQL Golden ran to build the chart; it is offered on data-backed charts, not on empty tiles or plain text.

Edit a chart's title and subtitle

Double-click a chart card's title to edit it in place, and double-click the gray line under it to edit the subtitle. Press Enter or click away to commit, or Escape to cancel. When a chart has no subtitle, an "Add subtitle" affordance appears under the title on hover. Committing an empty subtitle clears your text so Golden shows its own automatic description again. In present or view mode the title and subtitle are read-only.

While you edit a title or subtitle on a dashboard, a small format toolbar appears above it with text size, font, bold, italic, underline and color. The chart card's own toolbar hides until you finish editing.

Note: A long dashboard title clamps to two lines on a chart, or one line on a KPI or big-number card. Turn on Wrap title - a switch in the Title section of the chart's format controls, found by searching "wrap" - to lift the clamp and let the card grow to fit the whole title. Analyze chart titles never clamp, so the switch appears only on dashboard tiles.

Open a chart in the full editor

Click Analyze on a chart's toolbar, or select the chart and press Enter. The full Analyze editor opens over the dashboard, with the chart's shelves, fields, and filters. Changes you make there flow back to the tile. Click Minimize or press Esc to return to the board exactly where you left it.

Select and edit several objects

Draw a box - drag across an empty part of the canvas. Everything the box touches is selected. Hold Shift while you drag to add to what is already selected.
Add or remove one object - Shift-click, Command-click, or Ctrl-click it.
Move them together - drag any selected object and the rest come with it.
Resize them together - with two or more selected, drag a corner handle of the selection box.
Style them together - a change in the Format panel applies to every selected card.

Arrange rows and columns

New dashboards lay objects out in a column, grouped into rows and columns called containers. Hover a row or column to see its outline and a small handle; click the handle to select it, or drag the handle to move the whole group. You can also select a container in the Layers panel.

With a container selected, the Format panel shows its settings:

Layout Direction - Row, Column, or Free-form, where you place objects by hand.
Height - Hug contents, or Fixed at a height you type.
Distribute evenly - gives everything in a row the same width, or everything in a column the same height. In a column this also switches Height to Fixed, since a column can only share out a height it has.
Padding - space inside the container, around its contents.
Spacing - the gap between the items inside it.

Tip: The toolbar's Auto Layout button tidies a whole board at once, placing tiles by role - a KPI strip on top, a hero chart, filter cards in their own strip - rather than a uniform grid, and Choose a layout template starts from a ready-made arrangement.

Moving objects and navigating the canvas

Drag a tile from anywhere on its body to move it, including over a chart's plot. Controls inside a card - table cells, sliders, buttons, links, and editable text - take the click themselves, and a band about 20 pixels wide around each card's edge always grabs the card.

Zoom - the zoom control offers Fit Width, Fit to Page, presets from 50% to 200%, and a Custom slider from 25% to 200%.
Keyboard zoom - the plus and minus keys step by 10%.
Zoom and pan gestures - Command with scroll or a pinch to zoom; Command with drag, a middle-click drag, or a two-finger swipe to pan. Use Ctrl instead of Command on Windows and Linux.
Toggle grid and Snap to grid keep objects aligned while you place them.

Styling an object

Select an object and the Format panel on the right rail shows its properties, such as Rotation, Corner Radius, fill and border colors with their opacity, Typography for text, and a drop shadow with Off, S, M, L, and XL presets. The panel has its own search box, so you can type the name of a control instead of hunting for it.

The right rail also holds Dashboard formatting for the whole board - Typeface, Card style, Accent color, and Canvas background - plus the Layers and Encode panels. See "Dashboard themes and styling" for the board-wide options.

Note: One property worth knowing: "Ignore dashboard filters" on a selected object exempts it from the board's filters. Useful for a card that should always show the full context next to filtered ones.

Undo and history

Each dashboard keeps its own undo history, so undoing on one board never reverses work you did on another. Use Undo and Redo in the top bar, or Command-Z and Command-Shift-Z (Ctrl on Windows and Linux).

The History button next to them lists the changes to the dashboard you are on. Click an entry to go back to that point, Revert to original to return to where the history starts, or Jump to latest to come forward again.

Heads up: "Clear & start over" empties the canvas. It is undoable with Command-Z or Ctrl-Z, but only while you are still in the session - do not rely on it as a way back from a board you meant to keep.