Did you have a happy February? We sure did! Over the last month, we spent a lot of time building out some essential features on the Grid platform, and working on hiring, especially for our dev, growth, customer success and sales teams. We also have a bunch of new features to debut, as well as a brand new blog. So, without further ado, let's march on into March!
Grid News
We're so happy to welcome our new colleagues Nebiyou, Rithik, Shariq, Saurabh and Sam, who are joining our family and filling out positions in our dev, growth, customer success and sales teams. As Grid's customer base grows, we remain focused on ensuring that we have enough resources and bandwidth to properly support them, maintain the platform and basically having enough boots on the ground to keep everything running smoothly.
We've also, as you can see, launched our new blog! As we welcome a wide variety of new customers into the Grid family, we feel it's important to have a means of regularly communicating not just what we're up to, but also our opinions on the general trends in the no code space. We'd also like to showcase our customers and their journeys as well as provide inspiration for you to build even more exciting and useful apps on Grid.
Our new blog is the way we've decided to do that. Every month you'll see posts from us on the above topics as well as occasional guest posts from industry leaders and people we admire. We're also going to be publishing some really in-depth guides, case studies and e-books, all geared towards helping you get the most out of Grid.
And speaking of getting the most out of Grid, here are this month's new features!
New Features
Worksheets : Print Format 2.0
Grid now allows you to create printable PDF documents by dragging and dropping elements from your worksheets into the Print Format editor. You can access the editor by creating a Print Format column in the 'Columns' page of any worksheet. The data in the PDF documents are auto-generated from whatever column in whatever Worksheet you want to pull the data from.
The new print format editor lets you create POs, invoices, bills of lading - pretty much any document that needs to be printed and which is comprised of data already in your system. You can also customize the document size, so smaller challans or receipts can be printed on A5 or even A6 size paper.
UX Overhaul : Grid's New Design
As we understand how our customers and users work on Grid and use our platform, we are constantly making smaller UX and UI tweaks to make that process easier. Sometimes it's as small a change as shifting cursor focus to a specific field rather than making the user click twice. And other times (like now) it's a big, sweeping design change that involves many hundreds of smaller changes.
With our big UI redesign, Grid's platform is now easier to use; we've overhauled dozens of user flows and we'd really like to hear what you think about it. We know there's room for improvement and optimization, so your feedback is super important for us to go further with this design. Leave us a comment, send us an email, use the in-app chat feature or use any other means (including carrier pigeon) to let us know how we can improve!
Column Functionality : LTW As Images
The Link to Worksheet column is one of the key column types in the Grid platform. It allows you to designate a specific column in any of your worksheets as a source of data. This is what powers a lot of the ease of use when you're filling data using the mobile app, because now you can designate a list of options for using to select from, rather than having them type out data afresh. (This also has the added benefit of removing the possibility of mistyping entries or having non-standard entries.)
Now, we've updated this column type to let users select images or icons that represent data options in the LTW column. This means instead of picking from text options, users can see a range of images as options for entry, and then pick one (or multiple, depending on how you set it up) images that represent the correct choice. How does this help? Well, consider an app where users have to report the status of a problem. Instead of having them pick a text status, you could designate icons (a green tick mark for 'complete', or a red X for 'not done') - this makes the process of updating the status much faster and easier! You can access this feature under 'Advanced Options', when creating a new LTW column.