Shawn Cao

We all love a good visualization — one that turns raw data into clear, compelling insights. Over time, people have invented countless chart types to help communicate ideas more effectively and make data more impactful.

Despite the variety, a handful of charts have become the go-to choices, so common that nearly every data or presentation tool makes them easy to create.

Today, let’s take a tour through these essential charts, explore their key variants, and see how they shine in different scenarios.

Color Season​

The rain has been pouring here for a few days, for Seattle, it means the beginning of the fall. I love Fall, it's the season of colors. In the morning, I feel so content walking with my daughter, on the soft yellow leaves toward the school, before the bell. That's even better if holding a warm cup of coffee, on the other hand.

I keep working on Columns because I want people to find the same beauty in their data.

Alright, here are our updates for September -

Airtable connection​

Airtable is used by many people, and we are excited to announce that Columns now supports Airtable connection. Just simply connect your Airtable, and choose any table to be analyzed and visualized in Columns.

Build beautiful and insightful graphs with your Airtable data, and share with your team or the world. You can also set a schedule to keep it up with your Airtable data.

Check out the example demo we put on the homepage: [https://columns.ai/airtable](Columns + Airtable)

The AI storyteller​

As we are planning Columns 2.0, we have fully embraced AI to help you tell a better story with your data. We are excited to share with you the first demo where Columns acts as a storyteller.

The full loop with Notion​

You may have tried Columns Notion integration Notion Integration to analyze and visualize your Notion database, but do you know what the full loop with Notion is?

It means, once you bridge Notion database with Columns, you can leverage a few functions to keep data and graph in sync with 0 effort. Let's dive into the details.

Columns Update April 2023​

April has been great so far for Columns and our users, people find it more and more enjoyable at data storytelling, from insights discovery, and chart building, to presentation beautification.

At the beginning of the month, we announced Notion Integration where you can easily build two-way sync between your Notion database and Columns graphs. Today, I’d love to share some more exciting features that simplify your storytelling process further.

Embed a live data story in your blog​

As a blog writer, do you dream about embedding a live data graph in your article? It shines your content to be more attractive and makes it much more digestible for your readers, also it makes it more worthwhile for your readers to share with others.

More importantly, what about if the data graph automatically updated, and you don't do anything to get the magic?

For example, current blog embeds a live interactive graph, as shown below (hover mouse over for tooltip):

Live Dashboard Release​

Greetings!

Columns is a data storytelling platform, we have continued building storytelling technology for you to do better communication using your data. It is designed to meet these goals, if any of these fails for you, we owe more work to you:

• Easy to discover and generate visual insights by data analysis.
• Handy design tools to customize and style a data story.
• Worry-free sharing with multiple communication methods.

In the last few months, we have received many user requests on building a dashboard. Columns is powered by its own big data computing infrastructure which serves large data set analysis, this distributed system is actually open-sourced, you can find it on GitHub if interested. With the advantage of this infrastructure, we can keep your visual stories in sync with your data.

So today, we introduce you Columns Live Dashboard.

Changes list​

Today we only present a single update - but BIG!! 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Scheduler Set a schedule to ask Columns auto-update your data story!

Changes list​

1. Add new graph type: Word Cloud
   1. It comes with a wizard where you can choose a single key column to render a word cloud.
   2. You can customize its palette to use different color to display text.
   3. General font settings impacts the word in display unless overwrite by settings.
2. Improved recommendations for Box plot and Word cloud charts.
3. Fixed a few typos and docs for Boxplot and Word cloud.