Capturing Insights

As you delve into data in visualizations, you can capture key information within an insight. Insights are live in that they can be changed and polished as many times as you need before you are ready to share them with others.

Insights enable you to take a snapshot of the information you see in a visualization, and help you remember “ah ha” moments while you work with the data. You can share insights in the form of a story, but you don’t have to. They can simply remain as a list of personal "ah ha" moments that you can use to go back to, and perhaps explore further. You can combine multiple insights in a story and you can link them to visualizations. For more information about linking insights to visualizations, see Adjusting Visualization Properties.

Note:

Insights don't take a snapshot of data. They only take a snapshot of the project definition at a certain point in time. If someone else views the same insight, but that person has different permissions to the data, they might see different results than you do.
To create an insight:
  1. Perform one of the following actions:
    1. Click the Insights tab in a project to display the Insights pane, and click Add Insight.
    2. On the canvas toolbar, click Story Navigator, and in the Story Navigator pane, click Add Insight.

    Note:

    You can also press the control key and “I” on your keyboard to quickly create an insight.
  2. In the Insight text box, click the down arrow, and select Edit.
  3. In the Description field, enter text to describe the realization you have for the data shown in the visualization at that moment.
  4. Continue adding insights to build a story about your data exploration.
    The story builds in the Story Navigator pane, with each insight displayed as a blue circle.

    Note:

    If an insight has a solid triangle, this tells you that it matches the project’s current state. If you navigate away from the insight, the triangle becomes hollow. This is useful when you are creating and navigating a story. The same solid or hollow treatment is also applied to the circle representing the current step in the Story Navigator.

    For more information about modifying and sharing stories, see Shaping Stories and Sharing Stories.