# Data (/docs/indicator-apps/data)



The **Data** tab shows one datapoint at a time, as a **record** rather than as a
form: what the datapoint is, and the figures collected for it over time. It is where
you go to read a number, check where it came from, or correct one - without working
through a questionnaire to reach it.

It is also where an app that runs **no round** collects. If nobody has set up
collection rounds, this is the only place figures are entered - and on such an app
only an administrator, or a reporting manager of the app who may also enter data there, can
enter them, because entering a figure needs either standing over the app's collection or an
assignment, and an assignment comes from a round.

## Finding your way around [#finding-your-way-around]

On the **left** is the list of the app's datapoints, in their groups, with a search
box over them. It is a reader's list: there is nothing to add, drag or reorder here.
Clicking a datapoint opens its record on the right.

On the **right** are three things, in order:

* the datapoint's **name** and technical id,
* a collapsed **Configuration** disclosure, and
* the **figures**.

Open **Configuration** to read how the datapoint is defined: its data type, its unit,
its guidance, which dimensions it is broken down by, its validators and its
applicability rule. It is read-only here - the editor is where a datapoint is
changed - and closing it puts it away again.

Below that is the same grid the editor's Data Input tab uses: a table or a chart, a
period navigator to move through time, transpose, and the aggregation controls for a
number. Your view of it rides in the address, so a link you send somebody opens on
the same datapoint, the same years and the same table-or-chart choice you were
looking at.

On a **required** datapoint, every cell still owed for the selected reporting period
carries a thin red line on its left edge - the counterpart of the green line a filled
cell shows - and one line above the grid counts how many cells are still empty in the
current view. Typing a value clears the mark straight away. A cell the datapoint's
applicability rule excludes is never counted, and a comment on its own does not fill
a cell: approval asks for a value.

## Reading is open, writing is not [#reading-is-open-writing-is-not]

**Everybody who can open the app reads every unit's figures here**, whether the app
runs a round or not - there is no strip, no hidden column and no narrowed table.

**Who may CHANGE a figure is a different question**, and the answer is: an
administrator, a reporting manager of the app who may also enter data there, or somebody
holding an assignment that covers it. That is narrower
than a dataset row, which anyone holding **Contributor**, **App builder** or **Admin** can edit, because a round decides who
answers for which reporting unit.

## Editing here [#editing-here]

You can enter and correct figures on this tab exactly as you can in the editor's data
grid, subject to the same rules:

* the figure has to fall inside an open [reporting
  period](./collection-overview.mdx#reporting-periods),
* you have to be an administrator, a reporting manager of the app, or hold an assignment
  covering the figure - which
  means your **own** units, for the datapoints the round asks for, in the period it
  collects,
* a figure that names no reporting unit at all - a company-wide datapoint - is for
  administrators and the app's reporting managers only, and
* an answer that has been **approved** is frozen for everybody, including
  administrators, until a reviewer reopens it. An answer sent back for **changes**
  stays writable - that is the point of sending it back.

When one of those refuses a change, it says which and what to do about it, in the
place you tried to make it.