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.
AI Design
On Columns, AI is used to help us with two main scenarios for easy data storytelling: Insights Discovery and Story Design.
Today, we focus on the second part, let AI design a beautiful and insightful presentation for you. This includes 3 initial functions we brought to the Columns editor
- Magic Theme: in addition to the built-in theme template, now we can ask AI to generate a customized theme for your specific story with a “topic” for styling, it generates background, colors, and palette to have a nice and comfortable look and feel.
- Smart Title: a smart title is generated based on your insights data.
- Insight Summary: a summary of your insights, AI will talk about your data and chart, I personally find the summary is a must to have for most storytelling.
These features free us from learning so many different settings to beautify a story, as time goes on, we will keep improving them based on your feedback, as we hope Columns will be your true co-pilot for data storytelling. Check them out and share your feedback!
Check out the demo on Youtube to see how these features play: AI Design on Columns.
Team Domain
For users who have a team plan on Columns, this is a step further for team customization and white labeling. On your team page, you can find your own sub-domain on Columns, you can set up your own domain to host all your stories. We will enable your own LOGO and styles in the near future, but please let us know what matters to you.
Open-sourced Graph API
We have open-sourced our core graph model, so if you are a developer, or you have an IT team, now you can access, build and host all your data stories in a programming interface, all through a simple API with an API key obtained from your Columns profile.
Check out this open-source project started from the Columns API landing page.
Graph/Chart Features
Last but not least, we keep improving Columns user experiences, to list a few that were added in April below, you may want to sign in to Columns and play with it to discover more updates lively:
- Axis ticks line hide/show.
- The trend line on Bar/Column chart.
- Easier navigation between “item” settings.
- Social preview of a visual story when sharing on social networks, eg. Twitter, and Facebook.
Thank you for being with Columns so far, many great things happen in Columns day by day, and we’re glad to have you ride with us. As we put the full force investing on AI, we wish Columns AI to be the ultimate place for you to build and share your data stories.
Let’s make Columns to be “Your co-pilot for data storytelling.”.