Category: Product versions

This update contains fixes and tweaks.

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.

This update contains fixes and tweaks.

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.

This update contains fixes and tweaks.

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.

Feed Services

Databricks Integration

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.

‍

Enhanced data exploration workflow

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:

‍

‍

This update contains fixes and tweaks.

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.

This update contains fixes and tweaks.

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.

This update contains fixes and tweaks.

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.

Brightspot CMS Integration

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.