It has been a little over a year since our major 2.0 release. Happy Birthday BIMSens 2!
We have already improved on it thanks to your feedback and support with 5 minor updates, but none packed as many changes as 2.1 coming out today.
In addition to the myriad of UI updates that we secretly sprinkled everywhere, the list of functional improvements can be found here, and we thought we’d cover some of the most exciting changes.
Cell Colour Coding
Probably the most wanted feature, finally here. You can know use Colour Filters previously restricted to 3D, to colour code the cell backgrounds in tables.
And it is not half-baked, it obviously implements the existing features of the 3D version such as range and gradient, but also comes with adaptations for ease of use in table scenarios:
- You can colour code a column based on the values in another column
- It picks font colour automatically (black/white) to maximize contrast
- You can use the same filter on multiple columns with a simple tick box to override the values source. This also means you can edit your colour filtering centrally, in one place for all uses. Compare that to the pain you are going through with colour coding in your favourite BI tool!
Grouping without Pivot and Multi Columns Sort
Answering feedback again, we extended the rows grouping capability. You were several to request for row grouping to be possible without requiring aggregation.
Well, you no longer need a pivot to perform row grouping! Directly from a Layout you can tick the columns whose values should be grouped. It will perform the same visual grouping and rendering as a pivot but show all individual rows under each group.
And as you may have glimpsed from the headers of the second screenshot, the data is sorted on multiple columns (matching the grouping order). Now, granted, sorted is not new, and Excel allows you to sort on multiple columns probably since its first release in 1985. But to this day (35 years later), applying multi-sort in Excel is still a multi-click operation involving other dialogue(s). There is a simpler way: since clicking the header sorts the data, control + clicking the next headers sort the data more. It doesn’t get simpler.
Forms Drop Downs: Search & ‘Other Value’
Last nugget for this realease, the drop downs in forms can now be searched simply by typing, and it searches any part of the strings.
Sounds simple but the ‘search any part of the string’ bit is what makes a whole lot of difference between looking up a user manually in a list of 2000 vs finding her instantly.
Added bonus here, when defining values lists for your drop downs, you can know choose to allow values that are not in the list, effectively using this more like a suggestions prompt than a data validation.
Honorable Mentions
There are many other additions so we invite you again to check the list of updates, the boards and pivot interfaces for configuration have had the most interesting updates. You can now propagate styles to all visuals on a board, include more taylored options by visuals such as local search and refresh, have a new board panel menu to maximize any visuals or see the data behind it. On the pivot side we fixed a couple glitches and added the ability to specify expected values for the pivoted columns.
And all of this comes with compatibility with Autodesk 2021 Suite.
As always, let us know what you think, and what you want to see next in BIMSens.