Best Of

Raise your hand if you have recently been mildly annoyed by this pop-up appearing in some of your DataFlows. 🤚😬

I’ve had a few questions and comments about it lately, so I wanted to address the pop-up elephant in the room.  While I do apologize for the mild inconvenience, I promise there IS a good reason for that pop-up.

Based on some feedback regarding the Larger Grid and Grid Lines, we decided to make it easier for users to have the Larger Grid experience by default.  In order to accomplish this, we made the following changes:

• All DataFlows created after 04/08/2025 have the Larger Grid on by default (no need to turn it on in the settings)
• For DataFlows created BEFORE 04/09/2025, the OWNER of the DataFlow will receive that pop-up when accessing that DataFlow, giving them a one-click option to opt into Larger Grid for that DataFlow.
  • If “APPLY” is selected, Larger Grid will be applied to that DataFlow, and the pop-up will never appear again.
    • Upon clicking “APPLY”, all tiles on the canvas will be rendered onto the nearest grid location.  You may need to rearrange a few of the tiles to get them in the locations you prefer, but it should remove the need to do extensive rearrangement.
    • A default Grid Line option of "Dots" will be applied to the canvas.  This can be changed from the right-click menu (more on this in a minute).
  • If “IGNORE” is selected, Larger Grid will NOT be applied to that DataFlow, and the pop-up will never appear again. 
    • The owner can still go into the DataFlow settings and select Larger Grid for that DataFlow if desired at a later date.
  • If the “X” is clicked, that is only a temporary dismissal of the dialogue, and the pop-up will appear again the next time the owner accesses the DataFlow.
    • I suspect this is what some of you who are annoyed by the pop-up are doing. 🙈
• We now have a setting you can request at the instance-level to force ALL pre-04/09/2025 DataFlows in your instance onto the Larger Grid.  Please reach out to me if you would like this setting applied to your instance.
  • If this setting is on, the Larger Grid pop-up will not appear on any DataFlows, as there is no opt-in and they will be forced to the Larger Grid
  • Upon opening a DataFlow, the tiles will be rendered onto the nearest grid point automatically (which might lead to needing to move a few tiles, but should be much less work than manually moving everything yourself)
• If your instance was created after 04/08/2025, Larger Grid is your default for all DataFlows.
• Grid Lines are still a per-DataFlow setting, but we made them easier to apply.
  • Right-click anywhere on the canvas and choose Grid Lines.  That will take you to a menu of the Grid Line types so you can choose which one you want.
  • Grid Lines are only available if Larger Grid is enabled for the DataFlow in question
  • Eventually, we intend to make Grid Lines a user-level default that will follow the user from DataFlow to DataFlow, but that is a future enhancement.

While I do believe these changes are a net-positive for the experience, I understand there’s a level of annoyance inherent to having a pop-up to contend with in some of your DataFlows.  Hopefully you can view the beauty of the Larger Grid and Grid Lines and forgive me for this minor evil I have inflicted. 😌❤️