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Welcome

Welcome to Columns!

Let's take 5 minutes to discover Columns - the simple but powerful data storytelling platform.

Streamlined data communication​

In today’s fragmented data landscape, professionals face an overwhelming number of tools just to complete a single data communication journey. A typical process might look like this:

  1. Data collection, cleaning, transformation, and preparation
  2. Data analysis and visualization
  3. Storytelling and presentation
  4. Insights delivery and feedback loop

At every step, people often turn to a variety of complex, disconnected tools—making the process time-consuming and frustrating. We understand how challenging it can be to learn and juggle them all just to get your work done.

Columns is here to streamline that journey. While we don't aim to replace everything—especially not step 1—we focus on simplifying steps 2, 3, and 4 with a cohesive, one-stop platform designed to help you move faster and tell better stories with your data.

You may have seen our core message: Columns supports your data storytelling journey across four key domains:

  • Data Connections
  • Visualization
  • Storytelling
  • Communication

Let Columns help you spend less time wrestling with tools—and more time delivering impactful insights.

Data connections​

Columns supports a wide range of data sources backed by its distributed computing cluster, just name a few:

  • Data services: Google spreadsheets, Microsoft excel, Notion, Airtable, etc.
  • Data uploads: upload your csv/tsv files to our cloud storage.
  • SQL Database: Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, etc.
  • HTTP API: connect to any HTTP API with a few clicks.

Analysis and Visualization​

Columns offers the most intuitive UI to visualize your data, simply through AI chat.

A few hightlights:

  • Auto visual recommendations: Columns leverage AI to generate visualization recommendataions for you to start with.
  • Columns provides well-crafted charts with an drag-and-drop UI for multi-dimentional fast data analysis.
  • The visualization is fully customizable, as a user, you can click any item and get it styled differently.
tip

Columns AI conversation is preserved in the history, as you chat more with it, it will learn your preferences and provide better recommendations.

Design and Storytelling​

Columns is a storytelling platform - many storytelling tools are available for you to build a beautiful and insightful story ready to communicate with your audience. To name a few:

  • Highlight specific key/metric through contrast color and opacity.
  • Add annotations
  • Add images, icons and emojs
  • Add shapes
  • Resize charts and customize its axes, title, legends, etc.

We believe - your story is way better in express yourself beyond just charts.

tip

Columns graph is a SVG canvas, you can simply click on any item and get it styled differently. Or you can move them around, just click and drag.

Communication​

Columns enables a seamless communication mechanism, take Slack integration for example, you could

  • Start a session of insights dicovery right from a Slack message.
  • Collaborate with your team on data analysis and insights storytelling.
  • Message your story from Columns to Slack anytime.
  • Publish your story for more widely sharing purpose, such as presentation.
tip

Simply connect your Slack account to Columns, and you can start sharing what you have built in Columns to your team instantly.

Summary​

Columns provides a streamlined experience to help us do effective data storytelling. It makes our data storytelling journey simple and enjoyable - use less time to achieve more!

Let's start with Columns!