You can begin installation directly from within the application. Either by clicking on the yellow banner that appears in the application, or by going to Help|Check for update in the menu of the Macrobond application.
If updating requires involvement from your IT department, please see the instructions provided here.
If you have asked us to contact your IT department directly for these upgrades, an email with information about upgrading to the latest version will be sent to your IT contact person. You are always welcome to contact the Macrobond team if you have any questions.
You can begin installation directly from within the application. Either by clicking on the yellow banner that appears in the application, or by going to Help|Check for update in the menu of the Macrobond application.
If updating requires involvement from your IT department, please see the instructions provided here.
If you have asked us to contact your IT department directly for these upgrades, an email with information about upgrading to the latest version will be sent to your IT contact person. You are always welcome to contact the Macrobond team if you have any questions.
You can begin installation directly from within the application. Either by clicking on the yellow banner that appears in the application, or by going to Help|Check for update in the menu of the Macrobond application.
If updating requires involvement from your IT department, please see the instructions provided here.
If you have asked us to contact your IT department directly for these upgrades, an email with information about upgrading to the latest version will be sent to your IT contact person. You are always welcome to contact the Macrobond team if you have any questions.
Databricks is an ecosystem where users can analyse data, and build data products in an agnostic cloud-hosted environment. Databricks is also renowned for the analytics and AI tools they provide.
The specific area we are focusing on here is the Databricks Marketplace.
Macrobond customers can now ask to receive their bespoke data feed directly into Databricks.
The main advantage of doing so is to offer an additional way of consuming the data via the Macrobond Data web API or FTP service for instance, and reduce the ETL ('Extract, Transform, and Load'). Macrobond data would be readily available for consumption directly into the customers' Databricks instance.
The publicly available Macrobond Pay-As-You-Go data feed on Databricks is available here.
Key highlights:
- Reduced ETL
- Bespoke data feed
- Minimum latency
Content
Macrobond ONE: Now-Casting Economics
The term now-casting is a contraction for now and forecasting and it is defined as the prediction of the present, the very near future and the very recent past. Now-casting is relevant in economics because key statistics on the present state of the economy are available with a significant delay. This is particularly true for those collected on a quarterly basis, with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) being a prominent example.
Now-Casting Economics delivers frequently updated near term predictions of key macroeconomic variables. These predictions are generated by a set of statistical models, which run continuously on the Now-casting’s proprietary platform. As soon as a new value for any of the input data series is published, the relevant Now-Casting models process the new information and update their predictions.
The dataset currently covers 33 countries, additional key macroeconomic statistics which include proprietary indices such as the Now-Casting Surprise Index.
Data navigation improvements
1. From International to National Source
Some sources are both international and national sources. When we treat these sources as international only, users can only find the data within Source & Release.
We will now treat the below sources as national sources, so that we can expose structure within Country & Region, allowing users to navigate thematically within the tree to find the concepts they are after. First release includes ECB and Eurostat.
2. US Labor Market
Some of the steps involve:
• Removing discontinued nodes
• Moving wages & earnings from Labor Market to Income & Earnings
• Taxonomy harmonization e.g. ‘underemployment’
• Deeper tree-nodes to denote better specific concepts
3. Customer-driven fixes, involving custom tree creation to ensure thematic navigation (after) vs. flat or no hierarchy (before)
Including, but not limited to:
• US Dallas Fed Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey
• US Retail Trade
Revision History expansion
Users will now be able to benefit from Revision History (access to vintages and associated time stamps) on International sources.
We are turning the feature on for Eurostat first; ECB will be next.
As a reminder, in the last delivery cycle, we also turned on Revision History for daily time series to capture the vintageTimeStamps, to be used as publication dates.
Facilitating cross-regional comparison - International & Subnational RegionKeys
1. International sources’ RegionKeys
RegionKeys allow users to change the region of analysis in their documents, or to link together similar time series programmatically, around a unique concept.
We are starting with Eurostat and will prioritize expansion based on customer requirements.
2. US subnational RegionKeys
Macrobond will now allow users to flip the Region being analysed at the sub-regional level e.g. state, MSA, city etc.
This enhancement covers 132 releases in the US
3. Chinese subnational RegionKeys
Similar to above, this enhancement covers 56 releases in China.
The new “Quick views” provides superior dataset exploration. You can now select ready-made templates combining charts and tables in one screen, via the mouse or through keyboard shortcuts.
With a time series selected, the Presentation Actions box now allows for several operations to open up pre-defined templates in a “Quick View” tab:
By popular request, this Quick View tab includes the option to open a chart and table in the same view:
And, even more conveniently, these functions can be assigned keyboard shortcuts in the Quick View settings:
Control the graph size to fit to your publication requirements
We’ve made several changes to give you more flexibility to control the size of the graph area, making it easier to prepare charts for publication purposes.
The main feature now available to you is the “Uniform pane size” setting. This will make all panes in a chart the same size, regardless of how many panes you use, and the size of titles and footers.
This is available in the settings for the Graph area (also in Style sheets) as well as in the Graph layout dialog.
Additionally, you now have full control over margin indentations from top, left, right, and bottom under Properties for Chart.
Margin controls now make it possible for you to control the positioning of the edge of the chart, regardless of the size and position of other elements like titles.
These two features combined empower you to control the spatial formatting of your charts like never before.
Additional ways to analyse rates and % data
You can now choose to use additive rebase in slice analytics. Each value of the timeseries in the underlying segment will be subtracted with the first value of the segment minus the value you input. This is particularly useful when you want to have result of each segment starting at 0.
Improved readability for charts with multiple panes
You can now choose to display the legend text per chart pane, so that each chart pane will have a floating legend text flagging series displayed in their corresponding pane.
Making bar charts more readable
Now the column headers and footers will wrap the text for column width adjustment without having to hard code the line break in the text box.
Backfill history using discontinued series
Macrobond may be required to create a new time series with a recent historical start point if there is a change made to the methodology of the time series or any other change.
Users seeking to extend the historical data of their time series can now easily locate related discontinued time series by right-clicking within the contextual menu. This functionality allows for seamless addition of these series to documents, enabling the extension of historical context for the main time series they are using.
Other use cases than backfilling history can be achieved using this feature.
Support for Chinese language
The general release of the application version in Chinese is now available to all users running v1.29 and above.
You can now opt for Macrobond in Chinese by changing your database language in your application settings:
If your application version does not allow you to switch the database language yourself, ask your Macrobond representative to activate the Chinese application for you.
The tree structure and time series descriptions are now available in Chinese:
You can begin installation directly from within the application. Either by clicking on the yellow banner that appears in the application, or by going to Help|Check for update in the menu of the Macrobond application.
If updating requires involvement from your IT department, please see the instructions provided here.
If you have asked us to contact your IT department directly for these upgrades, an email with information about upgrading to the latest version will be sent to your IT contact person. You are always welcome to contact the Macrobond team if you have any questions.
You can begin installation directly from within the application. Either by clicking on the yellow banner that appears in the application, or by going to Help|Check for update in the menu of the Macrobond application.
If updating requires involvement from your IT department, please see the instructions provided here.
If you have asked us to contact your IT department directly for these upgrades, an email with information about upgrading to the latest version will be sent to your IT contact person. You are always welcome to contact the Macrobond team if you have any questions.
You can begin installation directly from within the application. Either by clicking on the yellow banner that appears in the application, or by going to Help|Check for update in the menu of the Macrobond application.
If updating requires involvement from your IT department, please see the instructions provided here.
If you have asked us to contact your IT department directly for these upgrades, an email with information about upgrading to the latest version will be sent to your IT contact person. You are always welcome to contact the Macrobond team if you have any questions.
Macrobond has partnered with one of the leading Content Management System firms to simplify the publishing workflow for users of both tools.
Through a simple configuration in Brightspot, your publishing teams can browse your Macrobond document library and import charts directly into Brightspot. This avoids the manual steps needed to send each other files over email, simplifying workflow, adhering to versioning and permissions to ultimately get your content out to consumers quickly.
Contact your account manager if you are an existing Brightspot and Macrobond user and would like to access your Macrobond content directly.
In Brightspot, simply search for your Macrobond assets in the search bar. Narrow down the search by using the filters on the left. Then click on the link to take you to the asset directly in your publishing process.
Chart Output API
We have introduced a new endpoint in Chart Server API called CalculatePath. It returns both the data and the settings’ data powering your chart. This response will facilitate the integration of the documents you initially created in Macrobond into other systems, should you need to take the data somewhere else.
CalculatePath works in a similar fashion to RenderPath whereby the request expects to receive a path towards an .mbnd document and a presentation string (optional) in case you have multiple charts in your documents.
The API call will return a json file containing chart settings alongside observation dates and values for each component of your charts.
Screenshot of overall document settings:
Screenshot of truncated observation values
Note: This new endpoint is not bundled into the Chart Server API current version, as it requires further licensing.
These notes support user with deeper and more specific information on the features and updates in the release. Once read, the user should have the knowledge required to understand the new features or updates and know how to best use them.
In-App Inter-Company Document Sharing
Would you like the ability to share your documents with your clients in Macrobond? If your client is also a Macrobond user, then you can now share your work with them directly while adhering to your security requirements and retaining your IP.
This feature provides a richer, deeper and simpler content sharing experience for both Macrobond producers and consumers. It enables you to collaborate with your peers and clients in Macrobond just as you do today with your internal colleagues.
You can now create a shared read only repository and collaborate directly with your peers and clients. If you would like to collaborate on a document, simply save it to your own library and edit it directly.
Once set up, users will see a new repository in the Macrobond application:
This feature is now available upon request. Please contact your account manager to enable it and start sharing!
Animated Charts in PowerPoint
Following the recent hype around animated charts to support your analysis and storytelling in the Macrobond application, we are taking it one step further by allowing you to export these animated charts directly into Microsoft PowerPoint or Word.
We now support the export of the documents you have created in the application as videos, not only images: two formats are currently supported, GIF or video.
Tick the “copy path to clipboard” box and paste the item in PowerPoint or Word, without having to browse your local folders to find the video.
Relative Revision History
Have you always wanted to automatically and dynamically overlay the latest version of a time series with its previous versions? This is now possible in the Macrobond application. To date, you could have been requesting the revision number nth for every observation of a time series or a particular vintage as of a specific point in time. But you could not query the “version before last” vintage.
We have introduced in your document builder this relative method that supplements the hardcoded vintage date:
Three different methods are now available to set relative vintages.
Relative to:
The most recent revision: {now, +/- # observations}
A specific series vintage: {vintage date, +/- # observations}
The document vintage date: {doc, +/- # observations}
For the last two expressions, the relative number of observations can be positive, referring to next vintages.
LinkedIn Posting
Sharing your insights in your digital world?
We have now made this super easy with various options to copy or export your documents.
Copy: copy a Macrobond embedded object to the clipboard
Copy Special: choose the format you desire and then copy to the clipboard. This is where you can also set your favorite formats.
Copy special favorites: find your set favorites here from the previous step
Export an image or video: chose your settings and save to your local file. This is where you can also set your favorite formats.
Export favorites: find your set favorites here from the previous step
We’ve enhanced the "Send to LinkedIn" feature in the File menu too:
Increased the character limit to 3,000.
Added an additional format option for posting animated charts in GIF or video formats (Note that LinkedIn has a limitation of 20 seconds for animations).
Introduced an option to send your post as a draft, allowing you to preview and edit prior to posting.
For those of you who prefer creating and tailoring your posts directly in the LinkedIn web browser, we’ve also implemented new settings, saving you time in the content creation process.
You can now predefine your favorite copy or export formats, whether it is for static images or animated gif or videos. They will be accessible in your clipboard in one click, and all you need to do is paste them directly into your post.
The preconfigured format options for LinkedIn and X (Twitter) are now set so you can use them directly.
Chart images
For static images, you can use the “copy special” feature, and define your favorite format which you can then save (and later rename by double-clicking).
Animated charts, with GIF or video format
Contrary to images which can be stored in a clipboard, GIF and video formats require a file to be stored locally.
For such formats, you should use the “Export image or video” option. By creating a favorite template, the process is now faster for any future item as you can access the export option directly in the right-click context menu.
We recommend ticking the “copy path to clipboard” box, so that you don’t have to locate and find the actual file when creating your post.
Once created, the “export favorite” menu will appear when you right-click on a chart. Select it and paste your chart in the LinkedIn post (either by pasting a GIF from the clipboard, or by importing a locally saved video).
Note: Only available to Core and Data+ users.
Sharing a chart and its link
Do you spend a lot of time on Teams calls discussing your research and exchanging ideas on Macrobond charts? Then this feature will make internal collaboration with your team easier!
In one click you can now copy the picture of a chart together with its hyperlink and paste it in an email or into our favorite communication platform, like Teams or Slack. Any colleague also using Macrobond will be able to open the file instantly.
Using the “Copy Special feature”, you will now see the option “Copy image with document link”.
Side notes:
The document needs to be saved in a folder for this feature to be available.
If you plan to use this feature frequently, you can also save it as a “favorite copy operation”.
Additional graph types available for animated charts
If you fond of the animated charts feature, we now have extended this feature to all graph types with the exception Bar Charts and Pie Charts.
For example, the animation on the chart below is broken down to first display individually the movements of the three main CPI components: Housing, Food & Beverages, and Transport. The other components are then animated together, and to finish the headline CPI – displayed as line – comes animated.
Chart sizes stored within a document
To facilitate the preparation and maintenance of your publications, you will now be able to store individual chart sizes within a document.
Three settings are now available:
Application dynamic size: using the size that maximizes the space available on the charting area
Application fixed size: applies a unique chart size across all documents currently opened in Analytics
Chart fixed size: this new setting will store the chart size within the document. Anytime you open the file, the size saved will be applied on the chart.
Additional options with open documents in Analytics
We’ve added several options to improve the user experience when working with multiple open documents in Analytics.
In the “Open Documents” tab, you can now select multiple Macrobond documents, and:
Close
Close all other
Create Presentation Document, which will include all the charts previewed and selected in the list in one presentation document.
