Every month, ClicData offers new platform improvements and features that further simplify and enhance the way our customers work with, understand, and leverage their data to drive their business success. This monthly release cycle means that the platform is constantly evolving so that our customers can quickly turn their raw data into actionable intelligence that serves a multitude of business needs.
In 2020, there were five data features that stood out among the enhancements, offering increased user efficiency and ease of use.
First, let’s review ClicData’s platform and its capabilities:
What is ClicData?
ClicData is a 100% cloud-based business intelligence and data management platform. You can connect, manage, automate, visualize, and share your data from one single place. You can:
- Connect data from any data source using our smart native connectors or API
- Store and maintain the history of your data in your cloud data warehouse
- Prep your data with our ETL features—data cleansing, merge, fusion, transformation, aggregation—and create relationships between your datasets.
- Visualize your KPIs in interactive dashboards with 70+ visualization options
- Share your dashboards with teams or customers with live links or export them to the preferred format
Our Top 5 Features to Make The Most Of Your Data
1. Data Security with Team and Personal Folders
Our new Folder Security System gives you flexibility and power to organize and protect data based on the access rights provided to your teams and users.
The Folder hierarchy divides into two main branches: Personal folders and Team folders for both data and dashboard explorers.
Here are a few scenarios demonstrating the benefits of this feature:
- If a user wants to share folders with his costumers while respecting their privacy, he can create one “Main” folder per client and only give access to their teams and/or users. Each customer, then, will be able to manage folder levels 2, 3, and 4 for their own needs, without ever knowing that any other customers even exist in the account.
- If a user wants to share folders among several teams, he can create a “Main” folder per team and give rights to read and write as he desires.
- If a user only wants to use ClicData within his team, he can create folders by project, by topic, or by type of data.
2. Data dependency viewing
ClicData now offers a graphical way to view the dependencies and the properties of each data item that is used by or using the current dataset.
In our Data Usage tab, you can see a list of related datasets—Views, Merges, Fusions, for example—dashboards, and any schedules or alerts that incorporate the dataset. You can also navigate to the usage of other related datasets and edit and view the properties of related dashboards.
This page shows the outputs—what is used by the current data set:
This page shows the inputs— what the current data set uses:
3. Bulk Upload/Import
This feature lets you upload multiple files of different types—Excel, CSV, JSON or XML—from FTP or any cloud storage app at once.
You can filter by file name or order and select files based on dates and names. You can also delete or move files to another folder after the upload is complete.
For example, while loading files from Dropbox, instead of selecting a specific file, you can select a folder and click on ’Next.’
On the next page, you are offered several options to set your import rules:
4. New Data/Time Stamp Column
While loading data, a user can include a date and time stamp column to indicate when the data source was uploaded to ClicData.
This feature means you can historize data from different sources. Note that the current Date/Time will be added each time the data refreshes.
This feature is interesting when it comes to connectors that provide daily data, such as Facebook. In that case, the Date/ Time stamp helps you store and historize your data on a daily basis, in combination with our ‘Append & Update’ refresh method.
5. New Cache Feature
Our new cache functionality allows you to improve the loading time performance of your dashboards. It is especially useful if you have a complex data transformation process.
The cache can only be applied to views, merges, and fusions, and not to data sources.
To enable the cache feature, access your data set properties and then set the cache to prioritize fresh data or dashboard performance. The difference between “Use previous cache until new cache is ready” and “use view until new cache is ready” is the duration for the dashboard to reference the new data imported.
If you choose “Use View until New Cache is Ready,” then when the data sets are refreshed, your dashboards will immediately refer to the new data. The cache is built after that, and your dashboards will switch to refer to the cache data sets. If you choose to the other option, your dashboards will refer to the new data sets after the cache has been built.
For additional information on this feature, refer to this FAQ.
More Features!
While these are the top five features that our customers use to build their dashboards, we have released many, many more features to enhance your business reporting.
Other new features focus on data processing and transformation, new connectors, user and folder management, mobile dashboards, and data visualization widgets.
Learn more about all the ClicData features in our Help Center.
Upcoming features
Exciting new features are being developed as we speak! Learn more about our vision and future enhancements by watching our Roadmap webinar.