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Select marks and act on them

Click, Command-click, or drag a marquee to select marks, then keep only them, exclude them, see the rows behind them, drill in, copy their label and value, or ask why they changed.

4 min readUpdated October 30, 2026

Charts in Golden are not pictures. Clicking a bar, a slice, a point, or a region selects it, and a selection is the starting point for most follow-up questions you will want to ask.

Making a selection

  • Click a mark to select it and pin its tooltip in place.
  • Command-click or Shift-click to add more marks to the selection.
  • Drag across the plot to draw a marquee and select everything inside it.
  • On a map, the toolbar switches between Pan and Marquee select - or hold Command or Ctrl and drag to marquee without switching.
Note: Selection works the same way on a dashboard card as it does in Analyze. A gesture you learn on one surface behaves identically on the other.

What you can do with a selection

The pinned tooltip carries a row of actions. With several marks selected, the same actions apply to the whole set rather than one mark.

  • Keep Only - filter the chart down to just what you selected.
  • Exclude - filter out what you selected and keep the rest.
  • View Data - open the underlying rows behind the selection.
  • Drill into - descend a level, for example from a state to its counties. On a multi-mark selection this drills the whole set at once.
  • Why did this change? - hand the mark to the explain-change narrative, which works out what drove the movement.

Keep Only and Exclude confirm what they did, with messages like "Kept 3 selected place(s)" or "Excluded 5 selected cell(s)", so a marquee over a crowded chart is never a guess about how much you caught.

Copy a mark's value

Right-click a mark and choose Copy to put its label and value on the clipboard - a bar's category and the number it draws, say. Pressing Cmd+C (Ctrl+C on Windows) copies the selected mark the same way, unless you're selecting text on the page. With several marks selected, Copy takes them all, one per line, so you can paste the selection straight into a spreadsheet: each row is the label and the value, tab-separated, and the value pastes at full precision, so a bar labeled $31.4K pastes its exact amount. This works on Analyze charts and on dashboard tiles alike.

Selection across a dashboard

On a dashboard, clicking a mark can also cross-filter the other cards. That behavior is controlled by the Cross-filter switch in the filter bar, which shows an ON/OFF pill - handy while you are exploring, and usually worth turning off before you share the board.

Tip: Keep Only and Exclude write real filters onto the chart. If a chart ends up narrower than you expected, check its Filters list - the selection actions are the most common source of a filter nobody remembers adding.

Asking for a change instead

Dashboard chart cards also carry an "Ask AI to change this chart" button, which takes a request in plain language - the box prompts with "Describe a change to this chart". It applies to that one chart, and the answer appears in the AI panel.