Signal Explorer
Visualize and develop derived signals
Signal Explorer lets you visualize existing derived signals, and quickly develop new signals in an iterative create→modify→visualize→test loop.
Click here to open the Signal Explorer, or from the Exabel menu bar, click "Data management" → "Signal explorer".
Visualize signals
To visualize an existing derived signal, select 1 or more companies or tags under "Select companies", then select an existing signal from your Library, and click "Plot Signal".

Picking an existing signal and visualizing it for 2 companies
There are a variety of other options you may explore on the left-hand pane:
- Time range: visualize your signals over a longer period of time
- Companies: by choosing to use a tag, you can visualize data in bulk for many more companies without manually entering their tickers. However, if there are a lot of companies and hence many time series, this may cause your browser window to become unstable.
- Signals: select multiple signals to visualize at the same time
- Evaluate at point-in-time: optionally, you may choose a historical date to visualize the signals based on their known values at that point-in-time.
- Plot type: switch between a time series plot (default) and scatter plot. The scatter plot will allow you to conduct correlation analysis.
- Axis options: show each time series on separate y-axes, on a single y-axis, and optionally plot it relative to the values at the start date of the chart.
Raw data signals may not be visualized in Signal Explorer
Only derived signals may be visualized in Signal Explorer.
If you would like to visualize a raw data signal, you can create a derived signal using a simple DSL expression to retrieve the data.
Develop signals
Signals commonly build upon other signals
It is common practice to build signals based on other signals. This may help in re-usability of signals, by defining an intermediate signal that is built upon by many other downstream signals. This also helps improve the readability of signal expressions - for long or complex expressions, you may extract part of the expression out into an intermediate signal and reference that in your final expression.
Signal Explorer allows you to easily do this by creating new signals with a few clicks, and visualizing these side-by-side with existing signals.
You may develop new signals by clicking on "Create" under "Select Signals" and entering a signal DSL expression. Then, click "Plot Signals" to see the new signal.

Creating a new signal with the signal DSL
Alternatively, if you have signals already selected, you may apply some common transformations by clicking ⋮ next to the signal and selecting from the list of transforms.

Applying a common transform from the Signal Explorer interface
You can save newly developed signals to your Library, by entering a name for your signal and clicking "Save to library". You may continue to rename or modify the signal expression, and save these changes.
(Note: signals can only be named with lower- & upper-case letters, numbers, and underscores; spaces and other characters are not allowed.)

Saving a signal to the Library
Updated 8 months ago
Learn about using the signal DSL to develop signals, or look into bringing signals into dashboards and drill-downs: