What's new
in Parabola?

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.