# Contour

Contour provides a point-and-click user interface to perform data analysis on tables at scale. These analyses can be used to create interactive [dashboards](../dashboards-overview/index.md) that allow others to explore and investigate the data in a guided, structured way.

![contour-overview-image](../../../assets/3cc6bdf424fc4e5fe930d43d29bb72957eb743c9e47201bd57c50fa13eb21b18.webp)

## Key features

Contour enables you to:

* Visualize, filter, and transform data without code.
* Organize complex analyses into analytical paths.
* Parameterize analyses to easily switch between different views of the data and results.
* Create interactive dashboards to share findings.
* Save analysis results as a new dataset for use in other Foundry tools.
* Leverage Contour's [expression language](../expressions-overview/index.md) for more advanced transformations and aggregations.

## When to use Contour

Contour is a good fit for analytical use cases where:

* **Some or all of the data you want to use is not mapped in the Ontology.** In general, we recommend using the [Ontology layer](../../ontology/overview/index.md) whenever possible, but there are some cases where this may not be appropriate (such as a one-time upload that will not be cleaned or reused).
* **You need to operate on a very large dataset.** For instance, performing joins on over 100,000 objects or aggregations on over 50,000 rows.
* **You want to share your analysis results as a new dataset for use in other Foundry tools.** [Learn more about saving results as a dataset.](../../analytics/datasets-object-sets/index.md)

[Learn more about other tools available for point-and-click analysis and when to use each.](../../analytics/types-of-analysis/index.md) For a deep dive into data analysis in Contour, visit [learn.palantir.com ↗](https://learn.palantir.com/deep-dive-data-analysis-in-contour).