# Dashboards from a question

> Ask a business question; Emolysis is designed to build the tested gold table behind the answer, chart it and share it as a link you control.

_Update, 2026-10-23: a question starts with `/dashboard` in the app; there is no `emo dashboard "your question"` command. Every use of Emolysis needs an Emolysis account, local CSV and Parquet files included._

_Update, 2026-10-18: every use of Emolysis will need an Emolysis account, local files included; the Free plan is one._

Most people will meet Emolysis through a dashboard. Someone asks a business question, such as monthly revenue by region for the last year, and wants an answer they can trust and share. Behind that answer there is always a pipeline, even if nobody calls it one. Emolysis is designed to build that pipeline properly, test it, and then draw the dashboard.

## How it will work

You will type the question in the app, run `emo dashboard "your question"`, or use the dashboard skill in your editor or coding agent.

The agent will search your catalog for the tables that hold the measures and dimensions you named. Working locally, with no account, it will be able to use CSV or Parquet files in your project instead.

It will then propose a semantic model: the measures (revenue, order count), the dimensions (month, region), the grain of the answer, the joins and the filters. You will confirm or correct it. We think this is the most important step. Most wrong dashboards are not wrong charts; they are the right chart of the wrong number, often double counted through a join or filtered on the wrong date. Reading a short semantic model is how you catch that before it is drawn.

Next, the agent will build the gold table with the [Aggregation / gold](https://emolysis.com/shapes/aggregation-gold) template for your platform, cleaning the sources with [Dedupe / conform](https://emolysis.com/shapes/dedupe-conform) where needed, and run the golden tests on DuckDB. A dashboard in Emolysis will rest on a tested table, like any other pipeline.

Finally, it will choose charts that fit the data: a KPI for a headline figure, a line for a trend, a bar for a comparison, a table for exact values. The chart spec has seven types: bar, line, area, scatter, pie, KPI and table. The same spec will draw the chart in the app and in the browser, so it will look the same in both. The [sample dashboard](https://emolysis.com/d/sample) on this site uses every type, with synthetic data.

## Sharing, on your terms

When you publish, you will choose who can open the link: anyone with it, members of your organization, or only you. Organization will be the default. A published dashboard will be a fixed snapshot; publishing again will create a new link. You will be able to set an expiry date, and to revoke a link at any time, which will delete its published data.

Publishing is the moment the dashboard leaves your machine. The charts and the data behind them will be uploaded and stored by Emolysis so the link can be opened. Publishing will send nothing else. Publishing shared dashboards will be part of the paid plans; on the Free plan you will build and view dashboards on your machine. See the [sharing docs](https://emolysis.com/docs/sharing).

## From a dashboard to a pipeline

The gold table behind a dashboard is a real pipeline. With a connected platform, you will be able to deploy it like any other, so the numbers will come from the full data on a schedule instead of a local sample. That is the path we expect many teams to take: start with a question, end with a tested pipeline in production.

## What it will not do

It will not guess silently. If a measure is ambiguous, such as gross or net revenue, the agent is designed to ask. It will not publish without you choosing to. And it will not hide its work: the semantic model, the SQL and the test results will all be there to read.

Dashboards from a question are part of the first milestone, on local data and then on Databricks. Read more on the [BI page](https://emolysis.com/bi) and in the docs on [dashboards from a question](https://emolysis.com/docs/dashboards). Nothing is released yet.

> Emolysis is in private development. Nothing described here is released yet.

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Page: https://emolysis.com/news/dashboards-from-a-question. Emolysis is a product of Bandpey GmbH, Munich, Germany. It is in private development, and nothing is released yet.