Show and tell
Your accomplice shows instead of describing.
Links to what it mentions
Every email, chat, document, file or page your accomplice mentions from a tool is a link into the app. Links are written by Mandala from the tool's own result, never guessed, so they always open the right thing. Questions about Mandala itself are answered from this manual, with a link to the page. While it works, each tool it uses appears as a compact card in the chat.
Dashboards and reports
Ask for something visual ("show me this month's spending", "a dashboard of our SEO") and your accomplice composes it from blocks, shown in the chat when small and beside it otherwise:
| Block | Shows |
|---|---|
| Metrics | Key figures, with deltas against before and sparklines; it knows whether up is good news |
| Chart | Line, area, bar, donut, scatter, funnel, heatmap or sparkline, with tooltips, zoom, a data view, and PNG or SVG export |
| Table | Search, filters, sorting, pages, formatted money, dates and links, and CSV export |
| Callout | An insight, a risk, a next step, good news |
| Cards, timeline, progress | Items to compare, events in order, how far along |
| Tabs | Several views in one place |
| Markdown | Short text between blocks |
Blocks sit side by side on wide screens. Filters narrow a whole dashboard, and selecting in a chart highlights the matching rows in its table. Sources says where each number came from.
Live dashboards
A dashboard built from your accomplice's read tools (your analytics, your records) stays live: press refresh to re-run those tools with the same arguments, or set a schedule (every hour, every day…). The refresh says when it ran and what, if anything, failed. A schedule that would re-run costly tools asks you to confirm first.
Everything shown is kept in your Library and stays in the conversation where it was shown. Asking for a change makes a new version of the same item.
Point at it
Anything on a dashboard — a point on a chart, a row, a figure — can be pointed at and asked about (Ask, or Alt+A). See Talking with your accomplice.
Live drafting
When your accomplice writes a document, a Goethe page or a Google Doc or Sheet, you watch it being written in the canvas. Google Docs and Sheets it reads or edits are shown live too, through the same accounts and permissions as its tools.
Newsletters
Your accomplice can write a newsletter in Markdown and render it as an email-safe page in your Library, shown in the canvas. Sending it from one of your Gmail accounts needs your approval of the exact issue, subject and recipient list; recipients are blind-copied.