Alphacast Friday Update - March 11th, 2022
Welcome to another update! There are new features and improvements almost everywhere in the platform, as we have been focusing on User Experience, navigation, and bug fixing. You should notice faster navigation, better search results, and small updates everywhere.
The most highlighted pieces of news are:
Publishers Publishing!
We have seen a lot of publishers' activity this week. Find out content by:
The course "Automation of Economic and Financial Analysis" has begun
Watch the video and presentation of the first class, or subscribe here. Next class, on Wednesday 16th, will be about pipelines and transformations.
New Learning Center & Home Page
We have made a full revamp of our Learning Center and our Home Page. In the new Learning Center, you will find improved documentation, examples, tutorials, and more.
Advanced formula editor (conditionals, shift, and more)
We have powered up the "Calculate Variable" step in the pipelines editors. There is now more flexibility to calculate new columns in a more "Excelish" way. There are now two new functionalities to the formula editor: Conditionals and the possibility to Shift the data N periods: A positive N lead will move the data N periods, and a negative N will lag it.
Begin by creating a pipeline with the step "Calculate Variable".
Use of Shift
SHIFT(Variable, lags_or_leads)
Example: Calculate daily percent percent change of variable @Close
@Close / Shift( @Close , 1) - 1
Usen of IF
IF(condition, confition_if_true, condition_if_false)
Example: If Pct_change is positive then return 1, else return 0
IF(@pct_change >= 0, 1, -1)
Alphacast hosted at "El Economista" newspaper
The economic newspaper "El Economista" has adopted Alphacast's chart engine on their online portal. We are super excited to see our visualizations in over a dozen articles!
See some examples here, here and here.
Other UX improvements on Charts, Datasets and Pipelines views, Home repo, and more
Users now have a Default Private Home Repo that will store all the content that has not been assigned to a repository yet. This greatly simplifies the steps needed to create any assets (chart, insight, pipeline, or dataset). You can now first create and assign to a Repo Later.
There are now more actions that can be done directly from the charts. User can:
- Insert the chart directly to insights in one click
- Jump to the Chart editor by clicking edit (no more searching for the chart to edit it)
- Find the related datasets and the data by clicking on the source
In any dataset, clicking "Transform Data" will take you to a Pipeline that is already connected to the dataset.
