The Workspace Tree
The tree is the shape of your investigation. Reading it well is mostly a matter of knowing why one item sits underneath another, which this page explains.
Why items nest
A node becomes a child of another when you reached it by drilling deeper — following a row into its detail, or an aggregate slice into the rows that make it up. Each level of nesting is one step further into the same question.
A node appears at the top level when you started something new rather than going deeper. So the tree ends up with one branch per line of enquiry, which is usually how the work actually divided even if it did not feel that way at the time.
Children are ordered oldest first, so reading a branch top to bottom follows the order you did the work in.
What each row tells you
| Element | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Icon | The kind of thing the node is — a grid, a record, a dashboard, a camera |
| Title | Derived from the view, or whatever you renamed it to |
| Summary | What was on screen, such as 461 rows · 1 filter · sorted Avg bet ↓ |
| Time | When you were last there, shown relative — "2 minutes ago" |
| Thumbnail | A picture of the view, where the view supports one |
The summary line is the part worth learning to read. It records the shape of the result — how many rows, how many filters, how it was sorted — which is usually enough to tell two similar-looking steps apart without opening either.
Thumbnails
Where a view can be captured, the node carries a small picture of it cropped to the part that matters. Thumbnails make a long tree scannable: recognising a chart by its shape is faster than reading six similar titles.
Not every view produces one, and a thumbnail is never required — a node without a picture behaves exactly like a node with one.
Tree options
The header's Tree options menu holds the controls for a tree that has grown large:
| Option | Effect |
|---|---|
| Collapse all | Fold every branch to its top-level nodes |
| Expand all | Open every branch |
| Show favorites only | Hide everything you have not starred |
Show favorites only is the one to reach for when presenting or when picking up an investigation after a break: it reduces the tree to the steps you deliberately marked as significant, which is usually the summary you would have written by hand.
Clear, beside the menu, removes the exploratory steps. Favorites and anything shared with the team stay, so clearing between enquiries costs you nothing you meant to keep.
Sizing and navigating
Click any row to go to what it captured — see Restoring a Workspace for what happens when you do. Drag the panel's left edge if titles are truncating; the width is remembered on that computer.
Rows carry their own menu for renaming, annotating, forking and removing, all covered in Adding and Starring Items.