This week brought significant enhancements to data handling capabilities, expanded historical mapping resources, and improved user experience across multiple Atlas features. The updates focus on making data analysis more accessible and efficient for users working with diverse datasets.
Features
Excel File Upload Support
Atlas now supports direct upload of Excel files (.xlsx and .xls formats), eliminating the need to convert spreadsheet data to CSV before importing. This enhancement streamlines the data ingestion process for users who commonly work with Excel-based datasets. Additionally, the platform now recognizes Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinate types during geocoding, providing more precise geographic positioning for datasets that use UTM coordinate systems.
Comment Control System
The comments widget now includes an administrative option to disable new comments and restrict editing on specific widgets. This feature provides project administrators with granular control over discussion areas, allowing them to lock down comment sections when new input is no longer appropriate or when preserving the current discussion state is important.
Vector Output for Slope Analysis
The advanced slope aspect analysis tool now offers the option to output vector data directly, providing users with more flexible data formats for integration into other GIS workflows or for detailed processing in external applications.
Fixes and Improvements
- Map data relations - Enhanced the map viewer to automatically display relevant data connections when map features are selected, with responsive design that shows relations in a bottom drawer on mobile devices and modal on desktop
- Lookup field filtering - Fixed issues with filtering and expression generation for lookup column types, ensuring accurate data filtering and widget functionality
- Lookup field styling - Corrected styling application for lookup fields, resolving cases where visual properties like radius weren't being applied correctly
- CSV comment exports - Improved the structure and formatting of comment CSV downloads, ensuring proper handling of special characters and consistent header formatting
- Text editor mentions - Enhanced the column mention functionality in text editors with search capabilities, improved keyboard navigation, and a more intuitive user interface
- Form status indicators - Added visual indicators in the project left panel to highlight forms with unpublished changes, providing immediate feedback about form status
- AI button visibility - Fixed an issue where the AI button appeared even when no valid AI metadata was present, ensuring the button only displays when relevant
- Popup editor updates - Resolved a display issue where popup editor fields wouldn't update correctly when the underlying card template was modified
- Marker image display - Fixed marker images not rendering due to incorrect URL formatting and improved component stability with better error handling
- Data ordering consistency - Ensured consistent ordering of folders and datasets by their position property, addressing potential display inconsistencies during large file uploads
- Map layer rendering - Fixed critical layer ordering issues including proper positioning of temporary and label layers relative to draw controls, and resolved opacity problems for new labels and icons
