We want to wish you all a Happy New Year with a big new release!
Data connection
Many of you have requested we make it easier to change the range for a Visual Grid. Well, we did that and more! We’re introducing two cool new features for the Visual Grid today:
- Named ranges: You can now connect Visual Grids to named ranges in Excel. Connecting to a named range means that if the range changes in Excel, Grunt will detect the change automatically and fetch the new data!
- Better tracking of ranges: Changing the range for a Visual Grid would often mean that you would have to clean up the modifiers. Now Grunt handles this much better, so you can move your range around in your Excel file. You will have to let Grunt know about the updated range (unless you use named ranges), but Grunt will do the rest. Note: This change will only apply for new Grunts created with this release.
Charting
- Added support for category axis tick marks
- Visibility of the secondary axis can now be toggled
- Improved chart bounds so it’s easier to see if a chart is selected
- Added support for rotation of category labels
- Introduced manual label placement for line series
- Added support for smoothed lines
- Added support for transposing chart data, so that categories become series and vice versa
Visual Grid
- We added a new modifier called Text Rotation. Many of you have requested it – now you can rotate text in the Visual Grid to your heart’s desire!
- Added margin and size properties to several modifiers
- Added a bunch of new icons to the Icon modifier
Quick settings
- We added a toggle to the Grunt ribbon that lets you toggle whether Ctrl+v should paste Excel ranges as Visual Grids or native PowerPoint tables
- We also added a toggle button so you can turn smart selection on and off directly in the ribbon. Remember that you can always press Esc to toggle off smart selection once for your current selection.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed a bug where z-order for gridlines in charts would be wrong
- Fixed a bug where clicking the show label button wouldn’t work the first time you clicked it in charts
- Fixed a bug which could cause the exporter to crash during Save or Send
- Fixed a bug where Grunt could suddenly start consuming substantial resources when using the Flag modifier
- Fixed snapping and sensitivity for charting gap gizmos