Control cells
Designed to give more power to your audience
The Count canvas is built for more than just static reports. Adding controls to your canvas transforms them into interactive reports and documents.
Interactive controls are special cells that enable readers to interact with a shared canvas. Each control produces a table of one or more values that your readers can edit, that can be referenced just like any other cell.
You can create the following types of interactive controls:
- Multiple select - a drop-down to allow selection of multiple elements from a column (max 1,000 results).
- Table filter - a field to add filters to a table
Use the canvas toolbar to insert control cells.

Where to find control cells in the canvas control bar
There are a few things to know about control cells in order to connect them to your queries:
They always have one column:
value
that contains whatever has been entered by the user.
Proof that control cells are just tables.
As they are just tables, you can add them into your
WHERE
statements to filter values, into the logic of a new column, or any other way you can think of!You cannot yet parameterize the tables in your FROM statement.

Example of how you can connect control cells
When you think about how you want others to interact with control cells, you can customize:
- the title (or prompt) the user sees
- where the control cell is located
- the options available
- the default values selected
Control cells will behave differently depending on whether a user has edit or view access to a canvas, and whether the canvas is locked or unlocked.
The table below summarizes how these two states interact:
🔐 / Access | Canvas Editor | Canvas Viewer |
---|---|---|
Unlocked canvas | ✅ Can edit control cells
👁 Edits are visible to everyone | ❌ Cannot edit control cells
👁 Can see edits to control cells made by editors |
Locked canvas | ✅ Can edit control cells
🙈 Can only see their own edits | ✅ Can edit control cells
🙈 Can only see their own edits |
In summary, if you want a canvas to act like a typical dashboard or notebook where many users are using filters independently then make sure you lock the canvas, but if you intend to use the canvas as a collaborative space, then keep the canvas unlocked and invite contributors to be editors.
Last modified 2mo ago