In order to help you to create and edit questions or dashboards yourself, what follows is a basic list of terminology which will help you in both building and communicating about various reporting mechanisms.

Card - a component of a dashboard that displays data or text.

Collection - a set of items, questions, dashboards, and sub-collections that are stored together for some organizational purpose.

Field - an attribute of a record in a database table. You can think of a field like the “heading” of a column, or a label on a container of values.

Filter - is a predicate expression that limits the results of a query based on some stated criteria. For example only including users who signed up between particular dates.

Dashboard - a data visualization that holds charts and text, collected and arranged on a single screen.

Data type - a field’s classification as implemented directly by a database. Data types inform what kind of values should be expected in a field, such as integers, dates, or strings.

Entity key / Primary key - a unique value that identifies a row in a database table.

Foreign key - an ID field in a table that corresponds to the entity key (a.k.a. the primary key) of another table, establishing a relationship between the two tables.

Metric - a calculation performed on a measure. Metrics are quantitative attributes of data, with some summarization applied.

Question - a query, its results, and its visualization.

Record - a group of related data with the same structure. Just like in a traditional spreadsheet, records in a relational database are stored as horizontal rows within a table, and contain values that correspond with that table’s fields, or columns.

Table - a series of fields, with the values of those fields arranged in rows, each row with a value corresponding to a field.

Riipen uses a tool called Metabase under the hood to drive all reporting and a full list of Metabase terminology is available here.