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Welcome

Hi there, welcome to Columns!

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

Streamlined data communication​

In the fragmented world, people has tons of choices to cover their data communication journey. For example, this is a normal process:

  1. data collection, cleaning, transformation, preparation.
  2. data analysis and visualization
  3. storytelling and presentation
  4. insights delivery and feedback loop

Along the journey, our users seek many different tools to make progress in each step. We deeply understand how painful it is to learn and master all these complicated tools to make your job done.

Columns is trying to streamline the whole process for you to get your job done in this one-stop shop. Though Columns won't do everything for you, especially step-1, it offers the streamlined experience for you to finish your job much easier for the remaining steps 2, 3, and 4.

AS you may have seen our key message, Columns helps in your data storytelling journey at these 4 domains:

  1. Data Connections
  2. Visualization
  3. Storytelling
  4. Communication

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
  • Data uploads: upload your csv/tsv files to our cloud storage.
  • Data warehouses: Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, etc.
  • Streaming services: Kafka.
  • General file services: HTTP connections.

Visualization​

Columns offers the most intuitive UI to visualize your data. 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.

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 give some examples:

  • 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.

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.

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!