Hex Everywhere

Last week, with the release of the Hex Knowledge Library, we talked a lot about the importance of creating Knowledge — making analytics work discoverable, organized, and understandable.

We are not, however, so vain as to expect all knowledge to only exist in Hex. For example, your marketing calendar probably lives in Notion, another knowledge base tool, or a custom intranet. This is correct and good. [^1]

So what happens when you need to include some data in a non-data-centric document? Say, a chart with historic marketing performance. You probably do what we all do: build the chart in Hex or another tool, copy a screenshot, and paste it in.

But the second you take that screenshot, the data goes stale. Severed from source. The chart is instantly out of date, the analysis no longer easily reproducible, and of course the worst part — no more tooltips on hover 😱.

That this obviously-broken workflow still exists, let alone thrives, is evidence of the Sharing Gap, one of the main problems with data work that we set out to solve with Hex. Nobody wants to take a screenshot of a chart, it's just usually the only reasonable way to share data.

We’ve built many features into Hex to reduce the size of that gap and make analyses directly shareable, but just having easily accessible links isn’t enough— the masses want to embed charts directly in line with the rest of a document, and they’ll screenshot them if they have to.

Let Them Embed Charts

So we built that for ~~ourselves~~ you. Not only can you now embed entire Hex apps directly into Notion docs or any other destination that allows iframes, but you can embed individual cells from Hex projects. This should Just Work™ anywhere that supports iframes— like Salesforce, Confluence, or even this blog!

You can use Hex embeds to power entire data stories, accentuate technical articles with interactivity, or even add a compensation calculator to your employee handbook. If you hadn't noticed yet, that "screenshot" image at the top of this blog post is actually a live and interactive cell embed.

We wanted this to feel as seamless as taking a screenshot, so it’s really easy and fast to take any cell (or app) and turn it into an embed. All the permissions from the Hex project remain in effect, and depending on the length of your fingers and keyboard layout, it’s actually less caloric effort to embed a Hex app than it is to copy/paste a screenshot:

So the next time you stumble upon a screenshot of a chart somewhere in your knowledge base, you know what to do: Politely invite them to the noscreenshots.club!

[^1]: PS: if you actually maintain your marketing calendar in Hex, DM us, we’ll send you swag