Explore

Start an analysis from a shared model's ready-made cards, then take the ones you want into a workspace.

Audience

Everyone

Prerequisites

A shared semantic model or Kater dataset you can read

Explore turns a shared model into a board of ready-made answers: headline figures, trends, leaders and patterns. Look through the cards, follow their next questions, and add the ones you want to a workspace, where you can keep building.

If you want to…	Use
See what a model can answer, fast	Explore › Cards
Answer one business question step by step	Explore › Use Cases
Keep a card and change its query	Add to workspace
Try SQL on a card’s query	Open it in the Sandbox

Read a model’s cards

Open Explore.

Select Explore in the sidebar. Workspaces › Make something new › Explore and New workspace open it too.
Select a model.

Open the Model picker, search, and select a model. Explore lists only shared models, and the board shows a Shared layer badge.
Read the cards.

Cards come in four sections: Headlines, Trends, Drivers and Patterns. Each card is a live chart over the model.
Follow a card’s next questions.

Open a card. Under Next questions, select Find next questions, and later Generate new questions, for follow-ups that fit its results.

What the cards answer

Section	Card	Question it answers	Example
Headlines	Headline	The latest period against the one before	Conversions last month against the month before
Trends	Trend	How is a measure moving?	How is spend moving, by week?
Trends	Running total	How is a measure adding up?	How is spend adding up this quarter?
Drivers	Leaders	Which categories lead on a measure?	Which campaigns lead on conversions?
Drivers	Mix	What share comes from each category?	What share of spend comes from each platform?
Drivers	Side by side	A measure and related measures by category	Spend and conversion value by platform
Patterns	Segments	A measure for a segment and the rest, over time	Sessions for engaged and not, over time
Patterns	Rhythm	Which weekday is busiest?	Which weekday is busiest for purchases?
Patterns	Cohorts	How does each cohort hold up?	How do return visits hold up for each first-seen month?
Patterns	Details	The rows themselves	Show me the rows of Ad Reporting

Answer a question with Use Cases

Open Use Cases.

Select the Use Cases tab. Use Search use cases to find use cases by question, or select Generate questions.
Plan a question.

Select a question. If it has no plan yet, select Plan this question. Kater selects the cards that answer it and checks their queries.
Work through the steps.

Each step has its queries, Refresh query, What the results show and Next questions. Select Add this query to keep a step’s query.

Explore, Use Cases view, with a question's numbered steps — The Use Cases view.

Add cards to a workspace

Select cards.

Select the cards you want to keep.
Select Add N Cards to Workspace.

The Add to workspace dialog lists each query with its state: Selected query, Required query or Already in workspace. Kater adds any supporting queries a card needs and reuses queries already there.
Select Confirm.

The cards become ordinary queries and charts in the workspace. Build on them in the editor. See Workspaces and queries.

Arrange the board

Select Edit to arrange the board. Add a New chart, select Keep on Explore to keep a card, or Remove from Explore to take one off. Changing the board needs edit access to the model’s Explore page.

Explore is one-way

Explore hands the shared layer into workspaces. Nothing flows back: a workspace’s queries never show on Explore, and Explore keeps no links to the workspaces that used its cards.

From the CLI or your agent

Ask your agent for the Tour my data starter, or use the CLI: kater explore tour lists a model’s cards, and kater explore card open opens a card’s query in the Sandbox.