What's new
in Parabola?

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!

‍

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.