How to create a topic

A topic is a subject that you can talk to your crystal advisor about, such as “revenue in North America” or “leads from paid social ads.”

The Topic Management Area is where the topic creation and management processes take place.

Here you can either find and manage the already existing topics and add new ones, according to your needs.

Once you have selected the data to build your topic, you have to select its objective. An objective is essentially the insight you want to get out of this data (such as a comparison, ranking or progress overview of your data).

Based on the objective you’ve chosen, you'll be guided through selecting the ideal visualization for your topic, in order to shape your data and express valuable insight.

Once you’ve created your visualizations, you can optionally add filters to drill down on specific data within the charts, such as zoning in on a specific country or timeframe for your sales data.

You’ll then need to help train your advisor by providing entities of your data. Entities are name variations or trigger words that you and your team will use when talking to crystal to make sure she gives you the right insights. For example, a synonym for revenue may be ARR. Finally, you’ll decide who can see the topic by setting permissions and ask crystal about it, review and publish it!

In summary, you’ll need to follow this flow to create topics for asking questions to your advisor:

1. Adding a data source (you should only have to do this a few times)

2. Selecting data tables for your topic

3. Setting an objective and a visualization for topic

4. Adding filters to your objectives

5. Defining entities for your data

6. Setting permissions for topics

7. Reviewing & publishing topics

Check the specific articles to know more about each step!