Dashboards troubleshooting

These are roughly in the order they come up when you build a dashboard from scratch.

The data panel is empty

There are three causes, quickest to check first.

The service has no Data Hub connection. Open Data Hub and check. Dashboards has no connection settings of its own, so this is the only place it can be fixed.

The connection exists but its scan has not finished, or found nothing. A connection registers its tables as managed datasets automatically after it saves, and until that finishes there is nothing to bind to. Check Data Hub for the datasets before looking anywhere else.

You are in a different service. The Data panel only shows sources belonging to the service the dashboard is in. There is no cross-service binding.

The AI cannot use my data source

Dashboard AI can only use data sources pinned to the current dashboard. A connection in Data Hub, or a source visible in the Data panel, does not make it available to the AI automatically.

Open the dashboard designer, choose Data, and use the star-shaped Pin control beside the dataset or data view. Confirm it appears under Pinned, then ask the AI again. Pins belong to each dashboard, so a source pinned elsewhere still needs to be pinned here.

If you cannot find the source, check that it is available in Data Hub in the same service. If the panel is empty, follow the checks above.

Dashboards and AI usage explains the steps and gives an example request.

A widget shows nothing

It almost certainly has no binding. Select it and look at the properties panel: if there is no Column Mappings section, no column has ever been dragged onto it.

Fix it by dragging a column from the Data panel onto the widget. Dragging is the only way to create a binding — the properties panel edits bindings that exist, and there is no dropdown for picking a column from scratch.

A widget shows a number, but the wrong one

Check the aggregation next to the column on the y axis.

A ratings column with Sum gives a large meaningless total. The same column with Average gives the rating. Nothing flags this because neither is an error as far as the widget is concerned.

Sum for counts and amounts, Average for rates, scores, and ratings.

A chart’s labels overlap each other

The chart is too small. A chart draws its title, axis labels, tick labels, and legend inside its own box, and when the box is small they overlap instead of shrinking.

Dated tick labels need roughly 60 pixels of width each. A bar chart needs about 500 pixels before category labels stop running together. A pie chart needs to be wider than tall so its legend has somewhere to go.

Make it bigger before you assume the data is wrong. If it still does not fit, reduce how many points the chart is drawing rather than shrinking the labels — a view in Data Hub restricted to the last twelve months is easier to read than three years squeezed into the same width.

A table shows a “Partial data” badge

The query returned more rows than the widget will draw, and you are looking at the first page of them. This is a limit the widget applies deliberately, not a failure. If you need the whole set, narrow the source with a view.

A multi-select drag knocked everything out of alignment

Holding Shift does two things: it adds to the selection, and it switches snapping off while held. So a Shift-drag lands wherever you release it, off-grid.

Undo with Ctrl+Z and move the widgets individually, or nudge them back afterwards.

The Schedule button is greyed out

Schedules can only be created from a published dashboard. Publish first and the button becomes available. The Schedules tab says the same thing in its empty state.

Readers cannot see my changes

Publishing takes a snapshot, and editing afterwards does not change it. The card in the dashboards list marks the dashboard Unpublished changes while the draft and the snapshot differ.

Publish again.

The dashboard shows old numbers

Nothing on a dashboard refreshes on its own — not in the designer, not in the published view. A reader sees the data as it was when the page loaded. Reloading re-runs every query.

If people need current numbers without having to think about it, a scheduled delivery is more reliable than hoping they reload.

The dashboard list is empty but I am a member of the service

If the service has teams attached to it, membership of one of those teams is required to see any dashboards, whatever your service role is. A service with no teams attached skips that check.

Ask a service owner to check the team assignment. Permissions has the detail.

I need to rename a dashboard

You cannot. The name is set in the creation dialog and there is no rename in the designer, on the card, or in any settings screen. The only route to a different name is a new dashboard.

The same applies to the layout mode. Both are worth thinking about when you create the dashboard, which is why Create a dashboard makes a point of it.

A widget renders as a plain grey box

It is one of the two legacy widget types — marketing metrics or campaign list. They still exist on dashboards that already contain them, but they are no longer in the library and they do not render in paginated mode.

Replace it with a current widget. There is no way to add another one.

The layout badge shows a raw key like dashboards.layoutMode.scroll

This is a display bug in the dashboards list, not a problem with your dashboard. The layout mode is stored correctly and everything else reads it correctly. Only that badge fails to translate, and it has been reported.