Values Tables, Images, and Widget Themes

Charts answer "how much" and "which is biggest". Sooner or later somebody asks "which records exactly?" — and that's the values table: a straight list of rows, one record per line, columns of your choosing.

It looks like the least designed widget on the canvas. It has more design settings than almost any other.

Default columns come from the dataset

Drop a values table onto a dashboard and it doesn't come up blank — it arrives pre-populated with a set of columns. Those aren't a guess. They're the default fields configured on the dataset itself, in the Fields panel of the dataset's edit screen.

This is a genuinely useful piece of dataset hygiene. Set sensible defaults once — say Opportunity Name, Account, Stage, Close Date, Amount — and every values table anyone builds on that dataset starts from a reasonable place instead of dumping ninety columns or none.

Adding a field to the table

Adding a column is done from the widget's query, not by dragging onto the table. Open the step behind the table, find the field list, and add the field you want — it appears as a new column immediately.

Order matters for readability. Put the identifying columns first (name, account), the categorical ones next (stage, owner, region), and the numbers last on the right, where the eye expects to scan them. Readers parse a table left to right exactly once; make that pass do the work.

Spacing: fit data to widget

The default table spacing is generous, which means a table sized to fit your layout often shows four rows and a scrollbar. In the widget's properties, find the spacing option and choose fit data to widget.

That switches the table from a fixed row height to one that compresses to use the space it's been given — more rows visible, columns sized to their content, far less dead white space. On a dashboard where the table is a supporting detail rather than the main event, it's the difference between a useful list and a teaser.

Themes on individual widgets

A dashboard has an overall theme, but each widget can override it. In the widget properties you'll find a theme setting — flip a single table or chart to the dark theme and it renders with a dark background and light text while everything around it stays light.

Used badly this looks chaotic. Used deliberately it's one of the most effective layout tools available:

• Give the KPI strip across the top a dark theme so it reads as a distinct header band.
• Darken a single callout widget — the one number leadership cares about — so the eye lands there first.
• Use a dark background behind a table of images or logos, which almost always look better against dark than against white.

The discipline is to use it for grouping, not decoration. If two widgets share a theme, a reader assumes they belong together; make sure they actually do.

Rendering URLs as images

This is the property most people never discover, and it changes what a table can be.

Salesforce data is full of URL fields — user photo URLs, product image links, logo fields, document thumbnails. By default a values table shows those as what they are: long, ugly, unclickable strings of text that blow out the column width.

On the column's properties there's a show data as image option. Switch it on and CRM Analytics fetches the URL and renders the picture in the cell instead.

The classic use is an owner photo column on a top-performers table — faces instead of names makes a leaderboard feel personal and instantly scannable. The same trick works for product images in a catalogue table, account logos on a client list, or status icons stored as image URLs.

Your table now shows the right records, at the right density, with faces attached. Next we make the charts themselves explain their own data — with tooltips and chart markers.