# Learn how Vistazo works

## How does Vistazo work?

Vistazo is a dashboard tool. You describe the chart you want and the built-in assistant builds it
over your own data sources. It goes in three steps.

1. Connect a source. Five public sources are hosted for you and need no setup, and any server
   that supports MCP, an open standard for connecting software to AI agents, connects from
   Settings. See [Connections](/docs/data/connections).
2. Ask for a chart in chat. The assistant calls your sources, shapes the data and shows a draft
   in the conversation. Nothing is saved until you add it. See [Chat](/docs/chat/overview).
3. Add it to a dashboard. The draft becomes a widget that refreshes on the dashboard's schedule,
   stays wired to the source it came from, and moves, resizes or restyles when you ask. See
   [Dashboards](/docs/dashboards/overview).

The assistant works from each source's own tool descriptions, so a new source needs no modelling
before the first chart.

## What can you build in Vistazo?

Three kinds of thing.

- A **dashboard** is a page of **widgets**, each a chart or table that refreshes on a schedule and
  opens to anyone you give the address to. A **parameter** is a filter every widget on the
  dashboard can read, such as a date range. See [Dashboards](/docs/dashboards/overview),
  [Widgets](/docs/dashboards/widgets) and [Parameters](/docs/dashboards/parameters).
- A **notebook** runs Python over the same sources, for the questions a chart cannot answer. See
  [Notebooks](/docs/notebooks/overview).
- A **skill** is a procedure written down once that the assistant and your agent follow every time.
  See [Skills](/docs/skills/overview).

You build them from two inputs. A **source** is anything the assistant can read, whether one of
the five hosted public sources, your own MCP server or a spreadsheet dropped into a chat. A
**chat** is where you ask for charts and see them previewed. See [Sources](/docs/data/overview)
and [Chat](/docs/chat/overview).

## Do you have to use the website?

No. Vistazo serves the same tools over MCP, so everything the built-in assistant does at
app.vistazo.ai, your own agent can do from wherever you already work.

- [Make your first dashboard](/docs/quickstart) walks the website from sign-in to a shared
  dashboard.
- [Connect your own agent](/docs/mcp/connect) adds Vistazo to Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or
  any MCP client. [Vistazo as an MCP server](/docs/mcp/overview) covers what that agent can reach.