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Using Explore to search and analyze across projects

Explore is Outset's most advanced conversational analysis tool

Omika Jikaria avatar
Written by Omika Jikaria
Updated over 2 weeks ago

Explore is a new way to search and analyze insights across all of your projects at once. "Chat with your Data" lets you ask questions and pull insights, but only within a single project. Explore expands that functionality, making it possible to compare themes, analyze results, and surface trends across your entire research portfolio.


1. How Explore Differs from Chat with Your Data

  • Chat with your Data: Great for diving deep into one project at a time. You can ask questions, summarize findings, and pull quotes within that project.

  • Explore: Lets you analyze across multiple projects simultaneously. This is especially useful for spotting patterns, identifying broader trends, and consolidating learnings without jumping between projects.

Use Explore when you want to:

  • Analyze results across multiple projects at once

  • Pull key numbers and stats in seconds

  • Summarize results in table format

  • Compare trends across groups, demographics, or time periods

In addition, Explore has a much more advanced conversational style compared to Chat With Your Data. Explore will also update you on the steps it's taking to complete an analysis when you ask it to perform an analysis task, and it will even offer suggestions of next steps for analysis!


2. Getting Started with Explore

When you open Explore, you’ll see a page titled "Explore Your Research." You will see a question bar where you can type any question about your data. You can also start a new thread at any time.

Not sure what to ask? Click the Starter Questions button. These are AI-recommended prompts tailored to help you uncover valuable insights. For example:

  • What are the biggest problems our users are facing?

  • Are there regional or demographic trends in user feedback?

  • If we could fix only one thing, what would have the biggest impact?

You can ask Explore to filter to specific studies or projects:
This can all be handled via Explore's conversational chat. You can use natural text to request that Explore looks at only specific projects/ studies:

  • “Show me insights only from the Women’s Activewear project.”

  • “Look at the two most recent studies in Gen-Z Fashion Trends and summarize common pain points.”

  • “Compare findings between Study A and Study B within the 2025 Conference Swag project.”

You can also use Explore to set results to only specific timeframes:

  • “Show me insights from Jan 1 2024 onward.”

  • “Compare answers collected between March 15 and April 30 2025.”

  • “Only include interviews finished in the last two weeks.”

Don't know if Explore can do something? Just ask! It will be able to talk with you about what it's capable of doing


3. What You’ll See in Results

When you ask a question in Explore, the output will typically include:

  • Written summaries that highlight key findings

  • Tables with stats or grouped results

  • Trends across projects, demographics, or time periods

  • Direct quotes from participants that illustrate the findings

This mix of qualitative and quantitative output helps you quickly understand the story your data is telling.

Example output:


4. Saving and Referencing Your Threads

Every question you ask in Explore creates a thread, which is automatically saved in the lefthand sidebar. This makes it easy to revisit past explorations without needing to rerun the same queries.

You can also:

  • Save threads for later reference

  • Copy results directly into reports, decks, or other workflows


5. Other FAQ about Explore

How do workspace permissions affect Explore?

Explore only accesses data within specific workspaces. So for example, if your UX team has a workspace and your Market Research team has a separate workspace, users can only search information within their own assigned workspace with Explore. However, if users are switched between workspaces within the same organization, they will still have access to their previous Explore threads.

Can explore generate graphs or export images?

Explore can make tables, but cannot yet generate graphs or images. There is also no option to export directly to PPT or PDF from Explore.

What limitations are there on number of threads with Explore?

There is currently a limit of 20 threads at a time - if you want to create more, you can archive old analysis threads. Additionally, within each Explore thread, there is a limit of 100 messages within the thread.


Explore is designed to give you both speed and depth: quick answers when you need numbers fast, and broader analysis when you’re looking across multiple projects for trends. Pairing it with project-level "Chat with your Data" gives you the best of both worlds — focused deep dives and big-picture synthesis.


Hope this helps! If you have any further questions, please reach out to our team at [email protected] or via chat.

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