Add Documentation

Easily document and find descriptions of your data.

Select Star automatically loads and syncs table and column comments and descriptions, and documentation from BI tools and dbt, but you can also add or update documentation easily.

You can also add to and edit documentation easily in Select Star in a few different ways:

Add or edit data documentation

You can easily add documentation to tables and dashboards with the Edit Description button. Document columns by clicking in the description field.

Don't see this option enabled? Your data source may be set to Read Only. This is to prevent your Select Star descriptions from getting out of sync with your data source descriptions.

If you'd like to use Select Star to add descriptions, you can have Select Star Support enable editing on your data source and utilize Select Star's API to write descriptions back to your data source.

Click a column description to edit it. When the text is gray, this means the description is suggested and has not yet been revised or accepted by someone on your team. Of course, you can always edit the description and hit enter to save and it will become your user description in Select Star (and the text will change to black).

Add Tags on tables, columns, and dashboards, to annotate the category and status of the data asset.

Use the filters in the right sidebar to show tables with higher popularity scores but no description to identify the best places to start documenting.

Markdown Support

To add a description to a document, metric, tag, or metadata object, you can use the text editor that provides styling features via the toolbar or mini toolbar. You can also use markdown to write the descriptions by clicking on the markdown toggle at the bottom of the editor.

We support the following markdown elements: headings, paragraph, link, tabls, bold text, italic. text, code, codeblock, blockquotes, ordered lists and unordered lists.

Limitations: We don't support images and mentions in the description. When converting to markdown, the images will be removed and the mentions will become links. You can also click the "cancel" button to undo the conversion changes to get the images and mentions back from the rich text description.

You can also update descriptions via API.

The markdown support is also available in the column-level descriptions.

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