> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.unify.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Overview

> A live visual workspace your assistant builds for you

Some answers don't want to be a paragraph. Numbers that change daily, trends
worth watching, tables you'd otherwise rebuild in a spreadsheet every week —
these want to be *live views* you can glance at. **Canvas** is where your
assistant builds them.

<Note>
  In the Console this lives in two dedicated panes on your assistant's
  page: **Dashboards** (the views) and **Data** (the tables underneath),
  each covered in depth in this section. The area is being renamed to
  **Canvas** — these docs use the new name.
</Note>

## Two building blocks

Everything on the canvas is built from two simple, very flexible pieces:

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Data — the tables" icon="database" color="#2f9d97" href="/canvas/data">
    Structured tables your assistant creates and maintains while it works —
    numbers pulled from an API, results of a computation, records extracted
    from files. Organized like folders, browsable any time.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Dashboards — the views" icon="chart-line" color="#c95f5a" href="/canvas/dashboards">
    Live visual tiles built on top of that data — charts, tables, KPI
    cards, or any custom view — arranged into dashboards that refresh with
    the data underneath.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

The separation is the point: data collection and presentation are
independent. The same table can feed three different views; a dashboard
stays live as its tables grow; and either can change without rebuilding the
other.

## You ask — it builds

There is no dashboard editor to learn and no query language to write. You
describe what you want to see, and your assistant builds it:

* *"Plot repairs by category."*
* *"Create a dashboard with our sales KPIs and a revenue trend chart."*
* *"Track response times from our status API and chart the last 7 days."*
* *"Show me open work orders per operative, updated live."*

Your assistant creates or reuses the underlying tables, builds the tiles,
arranges the dashboard, and drops a link in chat. From then on it's on your
canvas, staying current.

## Why this is more than charts

Because your assistant controls both the data *and* the view, the canvas can
do things a normal dashboard tool can't do without an engineering project:

* **It can collect what doesn't exist yet.** No data feed? Your assistant
  can call an API [on a schedule](/tasks/overview), extract numbers from
  the files you email it, or compute the metric itself — and store the
  results as a table.
* **It can combine anything.** Two tables from different sources can be
  joined and aggregated into a single view — orders against refunds,
  pipeline against calendar.
* **It can derive new columns.** "Add a total column that's unit price
  times quantity" is a sentence, not a formula bar.
* **Views are unlimited in form.** Tiles aren't limited to a preset chart
  menu — bar, line, scatter, maps, KPI cards, styled tables, or fully
  custom layouts, whatever presents the data best.

## What's in this section

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="The data layer" icon="folder-tree" color="#cf9a3e" href="/canvas/data">
    What your assistant stores, how tables are organized, and browsing them
    in the Console.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Live dashboards" icon="grid-2" color="#4f7fa8" href="/canvas/dashboards">
    Tiles, layouts, live data, sharing, and the viewer in the Console.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Recipes" icon="lightbulb" color="#6e4a86" href="/canvas/recipes">
    Worked examples — API monitoring, KPI boards, combined sources.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>