Sharing and collaboration
Sharing variables, filters, multitables, decks and dashboards with your team means everyone can build on the same foundations rather than duplicating work. This article covers what to expect when sharing, editing and deleting shared artifacts.
All users can create and share artifacts — such as variables, filters, multitables, dashboards, and decks — with anyone who has folder permissions to a dataset view. This enables collaboration while ensuring that users don’t need access to modify the underlying dataset. By default, all users can share artifacts, but Editors can restrict this by using a folder setting.
Personal vs. shared - what it means in practice
When you create an artifact, you choose whether it's personal or shared. Personal artifacts are only visible to you. When you share something - either at creation or later - it becomes available to everyone on the team. There are a few important differences from personal artifacts:
- Any edits made to it take effect immediately, everywhere it's used.
- It can't be made personal again.
- It no longer has an owner. Anyone on the team can edit or delete it.
How personal and shared artifacts are displayed
Personal and shared artifacts are listed separately so you can see at a glance what's yours and what's available to the team. The way they're presented varies slightly depending on the artifact type. The examples below show what to look for in each case.
Variables:
Filters:
Multitables:
Dashboards:
Dashboards (in tray):
Sharing a filter, multitable, deck or dashboard that uses personal variables
Shared artifacts can only contain other shared artifacts inside them. So if you try to share a filter built on a personal variable, the platform can't share the filter in isolation, it needs to share the variable too.
When this happens, you'll see a message listing everything that's about to move from personal to shared. You can either proceed, or go back and review first.
This applies across all levels. If your filter uses a personal variable, and that variable is built from another personal variable, both will be promoted.
Editing shared artifacts
Any change to a shared variable, filter, or multitable updates immediately everywhere it's used - across your team's filters, dashboards, and analyses. You'll see a message flagging the impact before the change is applied.
This makes shared variables and filters powerful for keeping work consistent across the team, but a change to a widely-used variable or filter can have a broad impact. If you need to experiment, consider making a personal copy first.
Shared dashboards and decks work slightly differently. Before you can make any changes, you need to activate Edit mode, either by clicking the Edit shared dashboard / deck button, or by saving a tile to it. You'll see a message once, confirming that your edits will be visible to the whole team. After that, you can continue editing without further prompts for the rest of the session.
Your edit session resets when you refresh the page, navigate to a different dashboard or deck, or leave the dataset.
Deleting
You can delete your own personal variables and filters at any time. Shared artifacts can be deleted by anyone with access.
Either way, if a variable, filter, or multitable gets deleted that other artifacts are built on, those will break and show an error. Before deleting anything shared, it's worth checking whether others are using it.
See also