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.

Changes list​

1. Added a few useful chart types.
   • Tree map - useful for . (found in Tree chart settings)
   • Radar.
   • Boxplot, Dot plot in addition to scatter plot. These are useful for statistics.
   • Big Text: when there is only one number in your query result.

Changes list​

1. Completely new visual story workspace

   • Work with multiple different data sources in one visual story.
   • Save mulitple versions in one edit.
   • Brand new data source exploration, get all information about the data you're working on.
   • Get query recommendations from your data without knowning how to analyze it.

2. Support general chat for each visual story and drop-in-place chats in graph anywhere.

3. Fine grained access control of your visual story

   • Share with specific individuals (by emails), they will get email notifications.
   • Share with public/everyone with different permission level (viewer, commenter, editor).

4. Other improvements, such as

   • Support "percentage" format in value format options.
   • Support frame fine tuning bar race experience by introduce frame steps setting.
   • Other UI updates.

Changes list​

1. Improve usability of Tooltip - always place tooltip on the top over other visual elements.
2. Revamp on Bar Race, easy to create fully customized bar race chart.
3. Introduce entity repo to allow Columns to look up entity info by key (Entity examples: company, country).
4. Support different shape choices for arrow - Triangle or Circle.
5. When data expired in Columns Cloud during creation time, Columns now automatically reload it so users don't need to refresh the page.

Changes list​

1. Enhanced Line/Area chart to enable style settings for every single line (metric).
2. More reliable settings of appropriate number of axis tick count.
3. Limit breakdowns from freezing web UI when there is a huge breakdowns in pivoting case.
4. Bug fixes - such as sorting state loss, value precision can not set to 0.