What's new
in Parabola?

Hundreds of Parabola customers use AI to make sense of unstructured data and build powerful, streamlined Flows. 

AI steps in Parabola are now not only faster to set up and run, but also deliver more accurate results. The recent upgrade includes three major highlights: 

1. A new testing experience: A fast feedback loop is key to successfully configuring AI steps. You’ll now see the ability to test your settings on a certain number of rows, directly inside of any AI step (just click the ⚙️ icon). 
2. Speed and scale improvements: AI steps now run 2x faster allowing them to support larger amounts of data. 
3. Enhanced prompting for Extract and Categorize: Similar to our PDF parser, our Extract and Categorize steps now allow you to provide example values and column-specific instructions to improve the accuracy of your results. 

From your messiest documents to your tidiest ERP reports, leverage these improvements to extract, categorize, and standardize data with the power of AI.

When building in Parabola, there are times when you want to process some data, but not necessarily the entire dataset — like when you’re setting up an API call, joining large datasets, or using an AI transform.

With the latest upgrade to the "Limit rows" step, you can choose to limit your dataset just while you build — but remove the limit and use the entire dataset when the Flow actually runs. That means no more waiting on thousands of API calls or a complex "Find overlap" step while you build. 

Check it out and let us know what you think!

The Pull from NetSuite step has been updated to pull in custom fields and display them in the same way they appear in your saved searches. Prior versions of the step could pull in some custom field data, but it was difficult to use in a Flow.

Now, custom fields will appear as additional columns along with any other supporting data returned by NetSuite.

Flows are now more flexible with the addition of Excel file exports.

• Use the Email a file attachment to automatically email Excel files
• Use the Generate Excel file step to create downloadable Excel files

Both steps support multiple input arrows to create multi-sheet workbooks.

We’re excited to share a major upgrade to the way you and your team manage integrations in Parabola 🎉

With this release, you’ll have the ability to save and share integration accounts across your organization – making it easier for you to… 

• Manage and re-authenticate accounts (if an authentication expires, you only need to update it in one place, and all Flows using that account will be updated) 
• Improve visibility into integration accounts across your organization
• Share integration accounts across your team 
• Manage permissions for specific accounts

For a brief overview of the upgrade, check out this quick video, and explore our announcement doc for more information and optional migration details. We think you'll really enjoy the new system! 

If you've ever used Parabola, you've probably wanted to edit specific cells of data or 'just create a reference table' more than once while building.

With the new "Create a sheet" step, you can write or paste data directly into a spreadsheet interface and use that data throughout your Flow. This is particularly useful for situations where you want to create a dynamic reference table, test different scenarios/variables, and want to cut out working across Google Sheets and Parabola.

Check out the "Create a sheet" source step and our How To documentation to learn more! 

To further Parabola's integration with the Google ecosystem, we're excited to release a new Send to Google Drive step which supports...

• Creating Excel files with multiple tabs
• Creating CSV files
• Creating and updating Google Sheet files

This step will live alongside our existing Send to Google Sheets step to provide flexibility as you build. Check out the details in our product documentation and reach out with any questions! 

Three major updates in one 📊 here’s a breakdown of the release: 

• Visualizations on the canvas: You can now drop dynamic visualizations (like charts, graphs, and tables) directly on the canvas to see reports update in real-time as you build. 
• Dynamic dashboarding capabilities: It’s now even easier to graduate from Spreadsheet Land and create BI-quality dashboards with a faster feedback loop. 
• Live editing & powerful drafts: You can now edit Flows in real-time without needing to create drafts for every change — just directly edit the live version of your Flows, and watch updates automatically save.

Check out the video below for a full overview of the new functionality — and to see these features in action, explore this collection of free demo Flows. Happy building!

We’re excited to share that Parabola Flow documentation is getting a major boost 📝

Parabola Flows now use AI to analyze every step in a Flow, automatically adding process documentation as you build. Gone are the days of writing out a detailed SOP only for your process to change the next day! 

Next time you build in Parabola, you’ll see that the new “documentation” section of every Step will be automatically updated as you build. 

Learn more about the details in this blog post.

We're excited to introduce the mini-map, a new feature designed to help you navigate large and complex flows with ease. The mini-map provides a compact, interactive overview of your entire Parabola flow, allowing you to quickly orient yourself and move between different sections of your workflow.

You can toggle the mini-map on or off using the map icon in the zoom toolbar.

Connecting to APIs in Parabola is easier than ever: The Pull from API, Enrich with API, and Send to API steps have been redesigned to make configuration and testing a breeze.

• Connection settings all in one place: Our redesigned connection panel gives you more space when you need it, and no worry when you don’t.
• View the request and response: Use new controls to view the full request and response data sent between Parabola and the API for faster testing and iteration.
• Just point and click: With the new output settings, keep the columns you need from the API, and forget the rest.

We’re excited to announce a new feature in our PDF AI parser that allows you to parse multiple formats of PDFs with greater control and precision - all in one “Pull from email attachment” step!

You can now set specific rules (called “formats”) for different types of PDFs that you receive via email, using a new mode that lets you configure multiple PDF formats — for example, invoices from different vendors — and pull key pieces of information from each.

To route PDFs to specific formats, you can create rules based on the file name, subject line, or other email metadata.

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Our Pull from Google Sheets step has been upgraded to pull more types of files from Google Drive. In addition to accessing Google Sheets, this step can be used to pull in CSV and Excel files stored in your Google Drive.

We’ve updated the Pull from inbound email step with options to pull in the full HTML representation of the body of an email, as well as a parsed list of URLs contained within the body.

This list of URLs can be used to isolate URLs from an email, fetch a document from that URL, and then process that document via the Pull from file queue step.

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Filtering rows and if else logic are at the heart of every Parabola Flow. We’ve given both steps a massive upgrade to make them faster, easier to use, and more powerful

Both steps have access to series of new operations:

• Filter dates to… (filter dates relative to now or a set date)
• Is unique (is the value in each row unique within that column)
• is not unique (is the value in each row not unique within that column)
• Text is equal to (equals but assumes text - faster than “is equal to”)
• Text is not equal to (equals but assumes text - faster than “is not equal to”)
• Text starts with (matches the first part of a cell)
• Text ends with (matches the last part of a cell)
• Text length is (length of cell = #)
• Text length is greater than (length of cell > #)
• Text length is less than (length of cell < #)
• Text matches pattern (regex match)
• Text does not match pattern (inverted regex match)
• Is between (between two numbers)
• Is not between (not between two numbers)

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Text field level options - accessible via the settings cog icon on the right side of any text field:

• Each text field can be toggled to evaluate what has typed in as a math expression, instead of just text. You can type numbers or reference them from columns using {merge tags}
• Each text field can be toggled to match based on the casing provided, or ignore the casing of the text

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Add If else column step-specific updates:

• Choose to replace value in an existing column, as opposed to only create values in a new column
• Add additional criteria to a single condition. This was already supported in the Filter rows step. For example, define a list of items that a field may be equal to.
• To accommodate all of these amazing features, the Add if else column step has a new design that is more compact and easier to read

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Parabola Flows can be set up to be triggered to run via an email. When an email is sent to a Parabola Flow, the Flow will try to enqueue the new run. If that enqueueing fails, an email is sent back to editors of the Flow alerting them that a certain email could not be processed.

With this change, that email also:

• Contains the name of the file attached that caused the issue (such as the wrong file type)
• Sends to the email address who sent the original email in to Parabola

Use the updated options in the Run another Parabola Flow to run Flows in sequence. The new options are:

• Run once per row
• Run once per row with a file URL

If Flow 1 tells Flow 2 to run, these options will allow Flow 1 to finish running before Flow 2 has finished. In the existing options, Run once and wait, and Run once per row and wait, the step will wait for Flow 2 to finish before it can finish.

Using the Run once per row with a file URL option will add runs to the file queue of Flow 2.

Use the new Pull from file queue source step to access and parse files at the end of URLs.

The file queue works like a webhook or email trigger, but can be triggered via an API call (webhook) or the Run another Parabola Flow step.

Use the updated Format dates step to easily change the format of dates, convert between timezones, round dates, and more.

This update completely overhauls the step with a new powerful date engine, updated interactions and design, and AI auto-detection.

We've added support for converting between timezones and precisely rounding dates.

Check it out here!

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Introducing, the AI co-builder. Configure steps quickly and easily using AI to transform simple prompts into complex rules and settings.

To use the AI co-builder:

1. Click the “Configure with AI” button to access the co-builder.
2. Enter instructions for how to configure the step and click “Configure it for me”
3. Once the AI has determined the right configuration, any existing settings will be replaced with the new settings.

The AI co-builder only runs when you click to configure the step. During subsequent runs, the step will not use AI to create results.

Now available in limited steps during the beta:

• Replace with regex
• Filter rows
• Format dates
• Find & replace
• Add if / else column

We're thrilled to launch Parabola University, a dedicated space on our website featuring video tutorials that guide you through creating effective Flows. What's more, you can access these helpful videos directly from the menu bar while you're building Flows.

Our website and product interface have undergone a stunning transformation! Explore the new colors, styles, and overall look and feel that reflect our commitment to making your experience more vibrant and user-friendly. It’s not just a makeover; it’s an upgrade to how you interact with Parabola.

We've released a few new features to make sharing and getting around Flows easier.

🎨 Colorful, Collapsible Cards: Dive into our latest update where you can now compress parts of your Flow with collapsible cards and organize them with vibrant, colorful banners. It's easier than ever to manage and share your workflow.

🧹 Simplified Flow Navigation: Alongside, we’ve refined the navigation to smoothly toggle between Published and Draft versions of your Flow, ensuring a cleaner and more intuitive experience.

The Pull from Email Attachment step now supports creating URLs to access the files that have been sent to a Flow.

When this option is enabled, the step can be configured to create URLs that are publicly accessible, accessible only to members of your Parabola team, or accessible to teammates who have access to the Flow.

More API request body formatting options

The "Protocol" dropdown in request body of all three API steps has been replaced with a "Format" dropdown.

In addition to JSON and GraphQL, Parabola now supports plain text, form-data, and x-www-form-urlencoded formatting types.

When using these options, if an API step does not already have a "Content-Type" header included, we will also now automatically add the right one, according to the last selection in the "Format" field.

This is available on all API steps - Pull from AP, Enrich with API, and Send to API

Merge tag support in header values

Utilize merge tags, columns referenced by name and wrapped in {curly braces}, within the value field of a custom header to merge in values for each API call from the input data.

Available in the Enrich with API and Send to API steps.

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We've completely overhauled the Flow builder to give you more performance, faster building, and more intuitive features.

Canvas

• Infinite canvas so you can build as far and wide as you’d like
• Better defined grid for improved spacing throughout your Flow
• Better performance for even your largest Flows
• Improved zoom and fit controls on the canvas

Steps and arrows

• Smoother arrow connection
• Updated design of step controls

Cards

• Place steps anywhere inside of cards
• Hold shift, click, and drag to multi-select steps inside of cards
• Move many steps in, out, and between cards
• Updated design of card controls

Try it out in your Flows now!

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Brand-new integration, hot off the press: we now support connecting to Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive!

We want all teams to be able to access their data as easily as possible. With these new steps, you can access any XLS and CSV files in SharePoint or OneDrive. Pull your files into a Flow, create new files, or update existing files.

This integration is available to all customers. Please refer to our documentation for more details!

Our latest release is next-level: it converts even your gnarliest PDFs into usable data, with really simple configuration. 

Now combining two elements of AI—battle-tested OCR and cutting edge multi-modal LLMs—Parabola does all the hard work transcribing and importing your data for you, so there’s no setup required on your end. 

Want to learn more about this new capability? Learn more

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1. The next time that you authenticate a Google Sheets step, you will see an updated experience. Instead of selecting files from a dropdown, you can use the native Google Drive file selector to find your file by searching or navigating through your Drive.

(Note: you will need to reauthorize existing Google Sheets steps in order to select a new file.)‍

2. When sending data to Google Sheets, you can now select a folder in which to create the new sheet(s), as opposed to always creating the file in the root of the drive.

We hope these upgrades make connecting to and using Google Sheets within Parabola easier and more delightful!

To take advantage of these changes, be sure to refresh your Flow.

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By popular demand, our Email a CSV Attachment step now supports dynamic values. Values can be used in any field: the email subject, body, recipients, and even the file name of the attachment. Simply reference the desired column using merge tags {}, and the email will automatically insert the first row from that column. All the details here!

You can now connect the Send to Parabola Table step to any other step, and in particular, the Run another Flow step.

By connecting these two steps, a Flow can first send data to a Table and then run other Flows that pull data from that Table. This ensures that connected Flows run in the correct sequence and that data is passed directly between them.

We’re delighted to announce that you can now process multiple attachments from a single email, using the “Pull from email attachment” step.

Previously, email-triggered Flows would always run with the first valid attachment received. Now, you can configure your Flow to run with each valid attachment received on a single email. So if you expect to receive one email with multiple CSVs, XLS, or PDF files, a single Flow can process them all, sequentially!

Check out all the details here.

We’ve also given you more visibility and control over your “queue” of pending Flow runs. For triggered Flows, you’ll see how many runs are pending, and you can manage how runs are added and executed.

Specify the format of any date column within a Table to improve the accuracy when changing its format.

Use the new “Recents” drawer in quick filters to access sets of filters that you have previously applied to tables and charts.

If you find yourself repeatedly filtering the same Flow, you’ll now be able to reapply those filters with one click.

We’ve also made filters easier to manage by adding a “clear” button, allowing you to instantly remove all applied filters.

The Compare Dates step can now calculate the difference between dates in terms of weekdays only, akin to the NETWORKDAYS function in spreadsheets. To use, select “weekdays” as your unit of measurement, and compare two dates (either two columns, or one column to current time). Here’s the handy documentation.

We’ve released a small but mighty feature to the Pull from FTP step!

The new “Archive file once processed” setting allows this step to cycle through a list of files in a folder, moving them after each one has been processed into a different folder.

Using this setting, you can build Flows that check folders for new files and process them one by one until the folder is empty.

We now support sending data to Snowflake!

Snowflake is an essential repository for storing and accessing business data. Paired with our Pull from Snowflake step, Flows can be used to automate and collaborate on critical processes.

Read more in our documentation.

Send to Snowflake is available to customers on our Advanced Plan. Please contact us or schedule a call if you’re interested in them for your team!

Hot on the tails of our exciting release of visualizations, we’ve added three new features to Parabola Tables to make them more powerful for reporting.

Append and upsert

From the Send to Parabola step, you can now decide whether your data should:

1. Overwrite on each run (existing functionality)
2. Append new data to the bottom or top of your Table (new!)
3. Update existing rows (new!)

This is great for anyone who is continuously adding new or updated data to their Tables, like week-over-week reporting.

Hiding and freezing

When looking at a Table on your published Flow page, you can now hide specific columns. These hidden columns can still be used within filters, sorts, or groupings for even more control over your final Table.

The first column and/or first row can also be frozen in place, so they “stick” while scrolling vertically or horizontally.

Use these to tailor Table views to exactly what you and your teammates want to see.

Automatic links

Any URLs in your Flow descriptions, Table descriptions, or even the cells within Tables will now be clickable.

Internally, we’ve found it incredibly helpful to add documentation links in our descriptions, and to easily access data that lives in another tool.

It’s a big day in the evolution of Parabola: we’ve added the ability to report on your data, empowering you to show your work more easily with data visualizations.

With visualizations in Parabola, you can:

• Keep everything in one secure platform – from the logic of your workflows to your reporting, to feel confident in the quality of your data and minimize manual work gathering information across systems and spreadsheets.
• Share important data with stakeholders through easy to read metrics that contextualize the output of your workflows and elevate your team’s work.
• Power agile reporting processes to transform ad-hoc analyses – like comparing data week over week – into automated, durable reports.

Take your data processes to the next level by building beautiful, shareable reports to share your work and make better decisions.

Learn more here!

Flow collaborators with view permissions can now request edit permissions at any time. Your request will be sent to Flow editors (or team admins, if necessary) for approval, and you’ll be notified via email as soon as your request is granted. The next time you open the Flow, you’ll have edit permissions!

You can initiate an edit request from two places within a Flow:

1. The “Share” modal
2. The viewer tool tip (hover over the “eye” icon)

Custom Tables descriptions are now available on every Table, making it easier for Flow editors to provide context and instructions. Add descriptions to let your team know what data they can expect to find in each Table, how to best utilize it, and more.

Introducing Starred Flows! 🌟 Star any Flow that you want to favorite or bookmark, and access them from the designated "Starred" sidebar (right beneath "Home"). Star Flows for quick access, like Flows that you're actively working on, or ones that you check regularly.

We’re excited to release a small but powerful change to how Parabola interacts with emails. Flows can now be configured to accept emails without attachments. Great for using a Flow to parse the body of an email, or for email triggered runs that are more flexible.

We’ve added a new member to the Parabola AI family!

Introducing: Standardize with AI.

Use the Standardize step to clean up messy, error-prone data. This step uses examples that you provide to either rename columns, or standardize a column of values.

For example:

• Clean a table where the names of columns are not always consistent, such as packing lists from multiple vendors. Convert columns with names like “Product ID,” “sku,” and “Style” into “SKU”
• Take a list of clothing items with inconsistent size names and standardize those names. Convert sizes with names like “Med,” “M,” and “mdium” into “Medium”
• Correct words that are misspelled, contain errant spaces, or have undesirable casing.

We hope you leverage this step and our other AI steps (categorize, extract, and experiment) to automate even more and build better Flows.

We’re excited to announce additional support for working with PDF files in Parabola: a dedicated upload step! Use our new “Pull from PDF file” step to manually select a PDF file to work with.

As with our PDF file support from our Email Attachment step, you can choose from four data types for utilizing the PDF data in your flow. Read more about those settings here. Try combining the Pull from PDF step with our AI steps, like Extract or Categorize, to automatically isolate the relevant information from your file.

This step is available for everyone, starting today!

We’ve reworked the Flow page to make Flows more accessible and understandable to those with view-only access.

• Flow descriptions: Custom Flow descriptions are now front-and-center, making it easier for Flow editors to provide guidance and instruction.
• Destinations: The new “Destinations” view allows everyone to see where each Flow sends its data. Now viewers who are new to a Flow can understand where the data is sent when a Flow is run.
• Private drafts: Now, viewers have a safe environment to customize their own private Table tabs. Viewers can highlight, sort, and interact with a Table without altering the Flow or its shared Views.

Whether they’re building Flows or not, your whole team benefits from accessing data that you transform in Parabola.

We now support a new data source in Parabola: NetSuite!

NetSuite is a critical tool for retail and ecommerce companies, serving as a key source of truth for product and resource data. With the Pull from NetSuite step, you can access any saved search from NetSuite and pull that data into your Parabola Flows.

This integration is available to customers on our Advanced Plan. Please contact us or schedule a call if you’re interested in NetSuite for your team!

Parabola can now intake, parse, and automate data from PDFs!

We’ve added support for PDF files to our Pull from Email Attachment step, which enables you to work with PDF files just like tabular data. The Email Attachment step will automatically parse PDF files sent to it, and you can build your Flow utilizing four different data formats, depending on how the PDF is structured (isolate key-value pairs, table data, etc.). You can even trigger a Flow from this step, so that the Flow will automatically run when a new PDF is sent to it.

Our PDF parsing includes OCR, so files with handwriting should be supported, and covers English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish languages.

PDF file support is currently offered to users on our Advanced Plan. Check out the Pricing Page for additional information, and contact us if you’d like a demo!

We are incredibly excited to announce the launch of three new AI-powered steps, available today to all users!

Parabola has always been powerful for working with structured data. But we know that doesn’t represent all of your tasks – many data workflows are still quite manual and burdensome because they deal with messy, unstructured, or variable data (like PDFs, email bodies, etc.).

That’s where AI comes in. With the combined power of AI and Parabola, you can create structure and automate processes. Use our new GPT-powered steps to transform your data:

1. Categorize: this step evaluates data and categorizes rows into the groups you define.
2. Extract: this step extracts specific information from the data you input. By naming the new columns that you want to populate, you tell the step which pieces of info to extract.
3. Experiment: this step lets you experiment with prompting the AI to revise your input data in any way. It’s the most flexible AI step.

Check out our linked guides for more details. We’re actively improving these steps every day, so please send us your feedback and needs! 🧠

Pop quiz: which Parabola page was rockin’ our oldest design system?

Answer: the Team page!

Well, no more. The Team page has been given a much-needed overhaul to make it easier to add and manage your teammates.

You’ll now see all members of your account in a list, with their team permissions visible at a glance (e.g. Admin, Editor). Admins can change member permissions by clicking on the permission dropdown, or through the gear icon at the right. You can sort this list by name or by permissions.

To add a new team member, click “Add teammate” at the top of the page.

We’ll be adding more team-level metrics and admin capabilities to this page, so let us know what would be most impactful for you!

Happy April, everyone – may it bring both spring showers and flowers! 🌸 Last week our engineering team did something a bit special. We decided to see how many features and improvements we could build in just one week. A little spring fling, if you will. So, by popular demand, we bring you:

Flows page:

1. Filters! You can filter by owner and by Flow schedules/triggers on the Home and My Flows pages (Team Flows page to come!)
2. The folder tree displayed in your left-hand sidebar is now sorted alphabetically, A-Z
3. When you view Team Flows, sorts will apply to both folders and Flows, with folders grouped at top

Tables:

When referencing a Table using the Pull from Table step, you’ll now see both the table and the Flow name, so you can be sure you’ve identified the right one.

Query input:

For steps with query input, like our database integrations, we added a larger query flyout field and auto-complete for query syntax, making it much easier to use.

We’ve created a new version of our Sort Rows step, with some great changes under the hood: the updated step can now sort complex data like dates and currencies with greater precision, as well as columns containing mixed types of data.

To take advantage of these changes, replace any existing sort steps in your Flows with a new step!

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We’ve completely redesigned how steps and cards are added to Flows! Using the new builder toolbar at the top of your Flows, access any integration, transform, or card template for easy building.

This new toolbar (which we lovingly refer to as “Superbar” 🍫 internally) is a big improvement to one of the most core interaction areas of Parabola. With its spacial layout, color coding, iconography, and tooltips, the builder toolbar is a quick way to find the steps you know you need, and a great way to learn about steps you never knew existed.

‍Here are the key changes:

• ↗️ Hover over any step or card template to learn what it does. Ever wonder what a certain transform actually does? Now you can see, thanks to illustrative examples for each!
• 💙 Steps are categorized with new icons, names, and colors to better represent what they do. The color categories will also produce some beautiful patterns ✨ in your Flows and should make them easier to read at a glance!
• 🗒️ Cards can be found in their new section, right alongside card templates. They’ve been given more room to explain themselves (so you know what a template does), and are categorized as your templates, or your team’s.

We also revisited the keyboard shortcuts for our power users:

• / or s to open the toolbar and initiate a search (just start typing!)
• Tab between the search, Integrations, Transforms, and Cards tabs
• Use the up, down, left, and right arrow keys to navigate within the lists
• Enter to place the selected step or card on the canvas
• Esc to close the toolbar

(Psst, Flows have even more keyboard shortcuts than this! Check out the full list here)

Parabola Tables are already a great place to collaborate and create rich, sharable reports.

Today, you and your team can officially ditch your pivot tables and use Parabola Tables to group and aggregate data. Groups can be nested and collapsed, and aggregations can create grand totals and subtotals on groups.

Add these calculations to create intuitive reports right from tables, without the need to edit your Flow logic.

Read about these new features on the blog!

Sprinkling in a bit of delight as we close out the year… We’ve made Flow and folder navigation much smoother!

1. Folders now have “permalinks,” which means that you can easily access Home, My Flows, Team Flows, and sub-folders through dedicated URLs, and go back-and-forth between them using your browser navigation. (Give it a try! https://parabola.io/app/flows/team-flows ) Should feel much, much better.
2. Within the Flow builder, you can always see the name of its parent folder! Clicking it will take you directly to that folder. So at a glance, you can be sure of where the Flow lives, and go back and forth between folder and Flow as needed.

With the initial release of Parabola Tables, your Flow evolved into a home for your data.

Today, you and your teammates can use collaborative Table Views to better understand the output of your Flows and create richer, sharable reports.

To hone in on the exact results you need, filter or sort your data, and then save as a custom view. You can label saved views and apply color themes or emphasize specific columns.

Read about these feature on the blog!

We’re honored to announce that Parabola is a launch partner in Webflow’s new App Marketplace, announced yesterday at Webflow Conf 2022. You may remember when we launched our Webflow integrations in 2020, and now Webflow users can connect to Parabola directly from the Webflow Marketplace!

Parabola is the best way to populate your CMS with data and dynamically keep it up to date. Here are some automations to get you started.

Have you ever tried to open a Flow, only to get kicked out because someone else already had it open? It can be such a drag…

Well, no more.

As of today, teammates can access a Flow simultaneously!

Whenever a Flow is opened by multiple Editors, the first user will retain edit access, and all others will get a read-only experience. If Parabola detects any changes to the Flow while you’re in the read-only experience, you will be alerted and prompted to refresh.

We hope this enables you to collaborate even more closely on Flows, and we’re so excited about the promise of a truly multiplayer experience.

Today, we’re excited to announce Parabola Tables: a brand-new way to view, share, and explore the data your Flows create!

Your Parabola Flows already centralize all of your processes and logic. Now, you can also publish the output of your Flows directly in Parabola.*

The new “Send to Parabola Table” step enables you to create reports that are easily shareable with your entire team. Tables created in a Flow appear on the Live view, and are visible to anyone who is a viewer on your flow.

You can also use data from those tables in any of your other Flows with the “Pull from Parabola Table” step, which unlocks new ways of linking Flows and data sets together.

Check out this video to see this all in action.

Use Parabola Tables to create and share simple reports, dashboards, and custom data sets between Flows. Read more on our blog about how to leverage tables, and what you can to look forward to!

^{*At launch, you can use unlimited Parabola Tables at no extra charge to your team. After a beta period, we'll move to a usage-based model for Parabola Tables data storage. (You will not be charged retroactively for usage during the beta period.)}

Pull from Redshift and Postgres steps now support the use of common table expressions! Use CTEs to make your queries more manageable and easier to read.

Learn more about CTEs in the Postgres documentation here.

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We’ve combined the Select columns, Rename columns, and Reorder columns steps into one, super powerful step: the Edit columns step! Now, from this single step, you can:

• Keep or remove columns
• Guarantee that selected columns are kept even if the input source removes them
• Change the names of your columns
• Update the order of your columns

Note: If you are using the Select columns, Rename columns, or Reorder columns steps in older Flow, they will continue to work. Going forward, you will need to use the new Edit columns to make those column changes.

To read more about this step, check out our Edit columns How To.

We now support three new data sources in Parabola: Looker, Snowflake, and Amazon Seller Central!

Looker, Snowflake, and Amazon Seller Central are key to mission-critical business reporting. Looker and Snowflake are essential repositories for storing and accessing data, and Amazon merchants rely on Amazon Seller Central reports to manage their businesses. Now, instead of jumping between tools, you can connect these three data sources into your Parabola Flows!

For more information about each:

1. Looker‍
2. Snowflake‍
3. Amazon Seller Central

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These integrations are available to customers on our Advanced Plan. Please contact us or schedule a call if you’re interested in them for your team!

Get more insight into certain API errors. Working with APIs can be difficult, which is why we've improved our error messaging for JSON and GraphQL syntax errors. In the past, you may have seen an error that your JSON or GraphQL syntax was invalid, but the error did not give any other information. Now, in all of the API steps, Parabola will show you the request that caused the error, which row it is on, and a small message about where to look for the character that caused the issue.

We've updated how the Live View of flows look to be easier to read and use, and to make way for some future additions to these pages.

Updates include a larger title, some information below it about who owns the flow, when it was created, and the status of the last run.

Speaking of runs, those have been moved to a panel next to the preview window, and scheduling has been collapsed into a section above them.

Keep your eyes out for some releases later that will really turn the tables on what this page is used for!

Flow email settings are now saved for each editor on a flow. Anyone who has edit access (via individual permissions or team permissions) on a flow can choose what kind of emails they want from that flow. You can choose to receive an email anytime the flow runs, just when it fails or pauses, or no emails at all (which is a new option!).

Access these settings from the settings view of a flow, or the settings modal from the Flows home page.

Flows that have the Pull from Email Attachment step and are triggered by inbound emails now can take advantage of a queue. If your flow is running when another email comes in, we will queue up that email to be processed in the next run. This is the same behavior that flows triggered by webhooks use.

The queue has been upgraded to allow any flow to queue up to 200 pending runs before any new runs are ignored.

Many APIs use OAuth2.0 to authenticate, which can be difficult to set up. The OAuth2.0 form (used by all three API steps) now has streamlined settings, along with a visual update. The simple version requires fewer fields to be configured and covers most APIs. The form also lets you toggle between the new simple version and the full custom version. When switching, values will be ported back and forth between the two forms.

We’ve made two new updates to the Filter Rows step that we think we add even more power to your flows.

Add multiple criteria to single filter

In the past, if you had a large list of criteria that you had to filter against, such as email domains to remove, you needed to add an individual rule for each criteria.

Now, the contains, not contains, is equal to, and is not equal to filter operations will accept multiple criteria fields.

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Use merge tags in a filter criteria

Previously, when you needed to compare one column to another, and the filter based on that comparison, you would use an Insert If Else Column step to perform the comparison, followed by a Filter Rows step to then filter based on that comparison (also creating an extra temporary column in the process).

Now, the Filter Rows step will accept merge tags. Enter any column name, wrapped in {curly braces}, to compare columns inside of a filter.

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Introducing Card Templates!

You can now build cards with steps and relevant documentation, and then save them as templates for anyone on your team to use. Card Templates are great for sharing common data sources, re-using parts of Flows, sharing documentation, and keeping Flows up to date across your team.‍

Some key things about Card Templates:

You can save any card as a Card Template to the sidebar. When a card is saved, you and everyone on your team can find it there and pull it into any Flow.

You can choose whether or not to shared authorized steps on a Card Template (think authorized Google Sheets, Shopify, database steps). This lets you more easily share team logins.

Once you pull in a Card Template to your flow, you are free to make any edits to it that you need. Consider Templates as a jumping off point!

Authors of a Card Template can push new update from any instance of that card. Anyone using that Card Template will be notified in their flow that the Template has been updated so that they can compare the new version to their current version before updating

Read more about Card Templates here!

We are thrilled to announce the launch of team folders! You can now create folders to easily organize and work on Flows with your team. Read about all of the changes in detail here.

We also completely redesigned the Flows page to make it easier to find, organize, and manage your Flows. What was previously one page is now three distinct spaces:

1. Home - this is your default landing page, and lists the Flows updated most recently
2. My Flows - this is where your personal Flows live. This includes your private Flows, Flows you created and shared with specific people, and Flows that were shared with you directly.
3. Team Flows - this is where your team Flows live. Here you can group Flows into folders (and sub-folders)! Flows in the team space are shared with your entire team, meaning anyone can find and access them.

You’ll also notice that Flows are now displayed in rows, designed to make it easier to identify the Flow you’re looking for:

To get started, we recommend creating folders and moving Flows into your team space. This will enable you to create a shared organizational system for your entire team, and make it much easier to find and collaborate on Flows.

There’s lots more to come, so please send us your feedback and ideas!

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We've updated the Enrich with an API and Send to an API steps to include an Error Handling settings section.

With these new settings, you can enable your API steps to pass through data even if some of the API requests fail. Modifying this setting will add new error handling columns to your dataset reporting on the status of those API calls.

Take your flows to the next level by routing rows with errors into branches to alert someone on your team about the errors, retry them, or anything else. Read more about it here.

Give your cards some personality and identity by adding emoji!

As a bonus, if you type in an emoji as the first part of a title, it will automatically be shifted into the emoji slot.

Placing steps into cards is even easier now!

We’ve improved our drop targets so that its easier to place steps inside cards. Cards are a great way to organize portions of your flows and leave notes and documentation.

The team is working on some more awesome features that will further build off of cards with steps inside of them, so stay tuned.

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All API steps now offer the option to select the request type POST (GraphQL). With this request, you can insert your Graph query directly into the request body to specify the exact data that you’d like to pull from an API.

This enhancement makes it far easier to request data from popular GraphQL API endpoints such as Shopify, Facebook, and Monday.com along with many others.

Reference our How To docs for additional information.

We're making it easier for you and your teammates to share your Parabola Flows. Three big updates are launching today:

1. Flow Editors: until today, Flows could have two different types of editors – "Admins" and "Collaborators." We've simplified these into one role, called "Editor." Editors can edit any part of a Flow, including sharing or deleting the Flow itself.
2. Flow Viewers: you can now add users to your Flows as Viewers! Viewers get read-only access to the entire Flow, and cannot make any changes.
3. Managing permissions: to review or change who has access to a Flow, simply click the "Share" button in the top-right corner.

For all the details, check out our How To guide.

We're thrilled to announce that you can (finally) undo and redo changes in your Flows!‍

Any edits you make during a Flow-building session can now be quickly reverted. That includes adding, removing, or repositioning steps, updating step settings, changing step connections, and so on!

To use, simply type those keyboard commands you know so well:

• Undo: ⌘+Z (on macOS) and Ctrl+Z (on Windows)
• Redo: ⌘+Y or Shift+⌘+Z (on macOS) and Ctrl+Y or Shift+Ctrl+Z (on Windows)

Or, click on the arrows now located in the Flow navigation bar.

To undo or redo changes in step settings, you can use the same keyboard commands, or click the arrows at the top of the window.

We released several updates to our Flow builder navigation bar, so your workflow can be faster, clearer, and more collaborative.

• Consolidated run actions (like “Update Live” or “Fix 1 issue”) make it clear what state a Flow is in, and whether it can be run
• Reorganized Flow actions keep your building tools in the same place
• Refreshed nav interface and interactions, from the “Home” button all the way to a new Parabola menu

Two new database integrations bring Parabola even closer to your data.

Our Pull from PostgreSQL integration now has its matching half! Use the Send to PostgreSQL step to automatically insert or update data in a PostgreSQL database.

We've also released a fresh integration with MS SQL Server, Microsoft's popular relational database product. Use the Pull from MS SQL and Send to MS SQL steps to create flows that connect directly to your database.

The two new Destination steps (Send to...) use connection pooling to drastically increase their speed. We extended this improvement to the existing Send to MySQL step, as well.

We've upgraded 8 of the most used, and sometimes slowest, transform steps! Most should run about 15x faster than they used to, which means if a step used to take 1 minute to finish, it will now only take 4 seconds.

• The Merge duplicate rows step, Remove duplicate rows step, and Insert row Numbers step will be faster in the flows that you already have them in.
• In order to get the speed boost for the Count by group, Sum by group, and Average by group steps, you will need to replace existing steps with their new version from the step sidebar.
• The Filter Rows step and Insert if/else column step will be about 4x faster in flows that they already exist within.

The Pull from Shopify step has been updated to pull in more information when pulling in Product Inventory. Previously, it pulled only the available inventory for each item at each location – now, it also pulls information about the items themselves! Most notable is the addition of the Cost field.

Secondly, the Send to Shopify step has been updated to work with customer addresses. When creating or updating customers, mappings are now available for the primary address fields.

The "Pull from email attachment" step has been updated to forward any verification codes back to your inbox. Once you verify a Parabola email address outside of your domain, you can automatically forwardCSV attachments to trigger your flow.

We've made the  steps sidebar collapsable! Now you can easily open and close it to get more space on your canvas, and stay in rhythm when you're building.

When the sidebar is closed, you can use the search keyboard shortcut ("s") to reopen it. The 'Help' button is always there for you.

Have you checked out our new Cards feature? Now you can easily add context to steps by using the rich text editor, improve the organization of your flow, and keep collaborators on the same page! 

We've made some UI updates to our Pull from Shopify Step. Configure your settings with clearly defined headers, select the columns you want to pull in without needing a separate step, and filter products based on any set of conditions! 

We've introduced more apparent tabs within the step settings at the top of the table, making it easier to explore input data from a previous step!

We pride ourselves as being the go-to tool for bulk data automation, and our new ability to import and export files through an FTP server only furthers that! Pull in CSV and Excel files, and work with larger data feeds including RSS and XML with our FTP integration.

We've made some major performance updates to our Filter rows step. This step can keep or remove rows based on a set of conditions up to 15x faster.

For those of you working with larger datasets, the performance update should be a big improvement. Check out how fast we can filter through 100k rows of data!

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Visual updates have been added to the builder including more consistent visuals and styling, larger arrows, intuitive text selection, and a single click to deselect steps. Tool tips have also been added to highlight any fixes to that need to be addressed in your flow. More improvements coming soon!

We’re excited to announce that the Send to Airtable step is now live! You can create, update, and delete records in your Airtable base without needing an API. Select the base and table that you want to send data to and map your Airtable field to the related column in Parabola.

We just launched our new design system for step configuration, codenamed "Metro" after Fritz Lang's silent sci-fi classic film, "Metropolis". Steps largely work the same, but you'll notice that the form elements that comprise them have received a major visual update. Our goal with this release (and the many that will follow it) is to make our steps look and work more consistently and to improve accessibility and learnability.

The Find and replace step has an improved look, as well as some new functionality. You can now find multiple values at once and replace them all with a value. You can specify if the find field should find the value as part of a cell, or as the entire cell. Similarly, the replace field can replace just the value that was found, or replace the entire cell if a value was found within it.

The Send to Shopify step now supports updating tags on customers, orders, and products. This is particularly useful for automatically moving products in and out of smart collections, keeping customers up to date with tags, and organizing orders.

We made some big improvements to our Pull from Shopify step. You now have the ability to pull in both Smart and Manual collections! With this new setting, you choose if you want to pull in data about your collections or pull in a list of products associated with a collection.

We resolved an issue where connecting steps would sometimes not connect the data in the first attempt.

We're excited to announce our new How To section! Enjoy consolidated, updated, and brand new How To articles to get the most out of Parabola. Whether you're new to Parabola and want help getting started, or you've been using Parabola for a while and need a refresher on some of our steps, we've updated and written these articles to cater to everyone.

Visit parabola.io/how-to to learn more!

Many of our customers work with large data sets in Parabola and scrolling through thousands of columns and millions of rows is not fun. We addressed that by improving our search. Now you can search column names and cell values seamlessly. We'll focus you in on the columns and rows that contain what you're looking for, but you can always expand columns and rows if you need more context.

We made it easier to see the version of your flow that is actively running so you can easily track down any issues. We also streamlined the ability to edit the draft version of your flow, so that you don't interrupt the active version until you're done editing. After many conversations with our customers, it's clear that this is more in line with the way they think about editing and running their flows.

We know that Parabola steps are core building blocks in Parabola, so we want them to be delightful to use. Our team has been hard at work updating over 20 steps in the past few weeks, and we're not done yet! We've announced all the specific step updates in our Community if you want to learn more

We overhauled onboarding to be a more integrated part of the product experience. We want onboarding to give new users more freedom to explore Parabola while providing relevant, contextual information if and when they need it. Onboarding can also now be revisited at anytime, in case customers need a refresher on using Parabola.

The Pull from Email Attachment step can now receive files up to 5mb. Previously, the maximum attachment size was 1mb.

We added email validation to the Email CSV attachment step so that it no longer shows a "calculation error" when an invalid email address is used.