Somebody asks “how are the cases split across the team right now?” and the reflex in most organizations is to export to Excel and build a pivot table — or worse, open a request for a BI dashboard that will be ready in three weeks. Meanwhile the answer has been sitting one click away the whole time. Every view in a model-driven app has a chart pane, every first-party entity ships with a pile of prebuilt charts, and the charts are interactive filters, not just pictures.
Show Chart
On any grid — cases, accounts, opportunities, custom tables — the command bar has Show Chart. Click it and the view splits: chart on the left, records on the right.
The important mental model: the chart is drawn from the current view. Same filters, same records. Switch from My Active Cases to All Cases and the chart redraws. Add a filter on the grid and the chart follows. It is not a separate report that drifts out of sync with reality — it is the view, aggregated.
The charts you already have
The chart pane’s dropdown lists every system chart defined for the entity, and for cases that list is long before you build anything.
Case mix by origin, by priority, by type; creation and resolution trends; cases by account; leaderboards. Accounts, leads and opportunities have their own sets. Most teams have never opened this list, which is a shame because “which chart answers my question” is a faster conversation than “which report should we commission”.
Charts are filters
Here is the part that changes how people use them: chart segments are clickable. Click the High slice of Cases by Priority and the grid next to it filters to the high-priority cases. Click a bar in Cases by Account and you are looking at that account’s cases. Drill through a couple of segments and you have answered a question that would have been three pivot-table steps in Excel — without leaving the list you were working.
Hovering gives you the exact counts; the expand arrow gives the chart the full width when you want to present it; and the pin keeps your chosen chart attached to that view the next time you come back.
Making your own
When the system charts do not answer your question, you can build a personal chart right from the chart pane’s menu (New, then pick the aggregation and the group-by), or an administrator can add a system chart in the solution so everyone gets it. Personal charts follow the same sharing model as personal views — private until you share them. The chart designer is deliberately simple: one series, one category, a handful of chart types. That constraint is a feature. If your question needs four axes and a slicer panel, it is a genuine BI question; if it needs “count of cases grouped by something”, the answer belongs here, next to the records, where drilling into a segment takes one click.
Charts also stack with dashboards — any chart you see here can be pinned to a personal dashboard — but even if you never build a dashboard in your life, Show Chart is the fastest answer machine in the product. Teach your team the button exists.
