What's New
- No-signup temporary accounts. June 18, 2008.
- Import straight from Excel. May 14, 2008.
- New getting started content on dashboard. May 7, 2008.
- International character support. April 4, 2008
- Sharing and permissions. March 27, 2008
- blist discovery. March 27, 2008
- Simultaneous editing. March 27, 2008
- Change a column's type. March 18, 2008
- Shared blists pane. March 18, 2008
- Email blist to myself. March 4, 2008
- blist activity dashboard. March 4, 2008
- CSV export. March 4, 2008
- Starter blist. March 4, 2008
- Importing data from a file. February 20, 2008
- Sharing a blist. February 20, 2008
- Charting. February 20, 2008
- Full text search. February 20, 2008
No-signup temporary accounts
Now you can start using blist without having to create an acount first. You can create new blists, import files, and browse through interesting blists and blist templates without signing up first. Only when you want to save your work for later do you need to tie your work to an email address.
Import straight from Excel
Now you can import XLS files straight from Excel into blist without having to save your file in a different format. blist has been able to import CSV files for some time, but now the common task of importing a spreadsheet into blist just got much simpler and easier.
New getting started content on dashboard
We have added a lot of new content to the blist dashboard to help people get up and running with blist more quickly. There are instructional videos and a few public blists with interesting data to browse through and demonstrate just a few of the ways that other people are using blist.
International character support
Many blist users are located outside the United States, many of those users work in languages other than English, and many of those languages include not only accent marks and non-English letters, but can alsouse completely different scripts, like Japanese Kanji or Mandarin Chinese. Now blist supports a broad range of languages for user-entered data.
Sharing and permissions
Now you have more control and can grant a broader range of permissions to people you share blists with: read, add, modify, delete. You can choose to keep blist data private, leave it public, or share with a few people:
blist discovery
now you can search through the blist templates created by other people, find a good one, and use it as a template for your own (the actual data is kept private, unless explicitly made public):
Simultaneous editing
Now that multiple blist users can edit and contribute to the same blist, two or several people should be able to simultaneously open and edit a shared blist, now you can.
Change a column's type
Now you can change a column from one type to another. You can change a number column to a text column. If you have a text or number column that just contains ones and zeros - you can convert that to a nice looking Check-box or True/False column. The most interesting thing you can do is take a text column that might have many rows, but with repeated data, like the State column in a list of addresses, and turn that into a neat pick-list with a drop down chooser in each cell:
Shared blists pane
Now you can easily go back to blists that have been previously shared to you by someone else via email. this is just one more incremental feature that hints at where blist is going from a social perspective:
Email blist to myself
We want to make blist incredibly flexible and easy to use. Now you can email a blist to yourself as either an html table or in a plain text format. There are a couple of things that this feature really helps out with: you can print the table directly from your email client, you can forward that email on to friends and colleagues so they can take a look at that data right away within their own email:
blist activity dashboard
We are building blist into the first online social database. Social goes beyond the simple sharing of documents like a spreadsheet. Part of that includes building a sense of community around data that matters. In today’s release we introduce the first live version of the dashboard, with the ability to see what’s going on in the blist community:
CSV export
In our last release, two weeks ago, we added CSV import. With today’s release you can now export your blist in CSV format, which is handy if you want to play with your data in Excel. To export, simply load your blist and click on the “Export” button in the File menu:
Starter blist
Another suggestion from people already using blist was to have a starter blist created for you when you create a new account. So we added that too. The starter blist showcases some of our most interesting datatypes and gives you an idea for theways in which blist goes beyond a simple spreadsheet
Importing data from a file
Importing data into blist from a CSV file. This allows you to get existing data into blist without hand-typing everything. This could be information that you already have in an Excel spreadsheet, or data that you export from a website, like historical stock prices from Yahoo Finance.
Importing is fairly manual and basic for now. Over time we'll try to do more by guessing column types and automatically generating pick lists. For now, while we're still in beta this new feature dramatically improves the process of migrating an existing pseudo-database from Excel into blist.
Sharing a blist
Sharing a blist with another person. When you have one of your blists open, you just click the share button and enter the email address of the person you want to share that blist with. Right now, shared blists are read-only, but soon we'll let you control whether the recipient can edit that blist.
Charting
Charting data in a blist. It's very useful to be able to chart data in order to visualize it better and see trends over time. Now you can create a variety of nice looking charts within blist. Load up your blist or lens and click on the chart icon (the one that looks like a pie chart), then select the chart type and X & Y axis and you'll get something similar to this:
Full text search
Full text search. Now when you search a blist for a particular word or piece of text, blist returns rows where that text exists in any column. Previously, blist only searched tags.