The Canvas

  1. The toolbar. Tools are categorised into 5 groups: Basics, New Columns, Reshape, Merge, Utilities. You drag tools from the toolbar to the Canvas to add it to your model. You can drop tools on top of existing tools to automatically add it after that particular tool. You can also drop tools on specific connection lines (see #25 below) to add it inbetween the previous and the following tool.
  2. The model title.
  3. You can download the data that you see in data preview (see #23 below). You can download as a .CSV or .XLSX file. We don’t recommend using the download data functionality with datasets larger than 5.000.000 cells (rows * columns).
  4. Undo
  5. Redo
  6. Toggle tool annotations. Annotations are prebuilt descriptions of what a specific tool does. In the case of the Input tool here it is loading a table called tww_payment. Annotations are helpful to quickly scan through what a model does. Tool annotations always contains a tool ID.
  7. Toggle snap to grid. This functionality means that tools are placed on the grid which can be neat if you want your tools to align perfectly.
  8. Clear cache. Less automatically caches the results from each of your tools. If you want to manually clear this cache you can click this button. If you would like to ensure that fresh data is flowing through, it’s a good idea to clear the cache and run the model again (for instance if the input changes).
  9. Click here to restart your session. Less works by creating a new session for you when you open the Canvas. A session is equivalent to a dedicated cloud computer working only for you. You can read more about sessions in the Tips and Debugging section. This button restarts your session which can be helpful if you started to run a large model and want to abort or if you feel like something is stuck (like a process that does not respond). The restart sessions buttons resets everything and let’s you start over.
  10. Use this button to run all tools on your canvas
  11. Exit the Canvas. Remember to save before you exit.
  12. Save your model. Here you can save your models which overwrites any existing model save (but you still have all versions), save as a new model as well as import and export models
  13. Row and column count
  14. Count of the number of tools that you have on the Canvas
  15. Manual zoom. You can also zoom in/out by pinching two fingers in or out on your Mac trackpad.
  16. Toggle a Canvas minimap. You can click and drag your mouse on the minimap to move around on the Canvas
  17. You can add tool-specific comments by clicking the circular information icon just above the given tool. That smart thing about tool-specific annotations is that they are completely attached to the tool, unlike a Comment tool. In other words, they’re ideal for documenting logic that happens inside a specific tool.
  18. This marks the tool status. Red means error, yellow means running and green means run successfully.
  19. Clicking the icon on the left-hand side of a tool opens the tool configurations (see #21 below)
  20. Click the text on the right-hand side of a tool runs the tool
  21. This is in example of a tool configuration. You can move this window around by dragging the top part of the window. The Save button saves the configuration, Save and Run saves the configuration and runs the tools, Cancel closes the window and discards the changes.
  22. Expand/Collapse the data preview window
  23. This is the data preview. It is limited to 200 rows of data. Whenever you run a tool, the data preview updates.
  24. Data types are highligted in the icon next to the column name. You can hover it to see the exact data type - e.g. an integer.
  25. This is a connection line between two tools.