Colorful data tables & faster app startup

Conditional formatting for data tables

Tables are essential tools for exploring data and can also serve as powerful visual aids in your published apps and dashboards. But let’s be honest—poring over plain tables to find what matters isn’t exactly a pleasant experience for your stakeholders. With the release of conditional formatting, you can now spice up your tables and make key results stand out with beautiful colors.

Coloring tables is easy: click on the Format button at the bottom right corner of your data table. In the popup window, you can define rules to dress up cells with either a single color or a color scale automatically mapped to the values in the selected columns. You can even combine multiple rules, and if they overlap, the last applicable rule will be applied.

These options give you the freedom to highlight what’s important and add some flair to your tables—whether in notebooks or published apps. We can’t wait to see how you’ll use this feature to make your data pop!

Better first-run experience for apps

We've rolled out a series of improvements to make the first interaction with your apps faster and more predictable.

First up, apps now start much quicker! When you visit an app, we're automatically warming up the machine in the background, so you'll spend less time waiting when you run the app or make changes to inputs for the first time. How much faster? It depends on your app, but we've already seen up to a 50% reduction in time to interactivity across many apps.

Next, we've streamlined the app configuration panel and added new options to give you better control over your app's execution logic and data freshness.

In App run settings, we've merged and simplified previous options to give you more clarity on how input changes will affect your app. You can choose between automatic and manual execution modes and decide whether to run only affected blocks or the whole notebook. The new default is automatic execution of affected blocks only, which should provide the best performance for most interactive apps.

In the App data section, we've made similar simplifications and added some extra convenience options. Run app from scratch always ensures a clean start. We've introduced a new control (Run app on open) so your app can automatically run whenever someone visits it. Show last run results helps you pre-populate results from the latest notebook run. If you opt for this, you can also schedule the notebook directly from this config, making it easier to keep app data fresh according to your custom schedule.