Tips and hidden features

The highest-leverage habit in the product. Build one project properly, then clone it for every subsequent one — layout, styling, and layer structure carry over, and only the data changes.

For recurring work this is the difference between a monthly report costing a day and costing twenty minutes.

If your team edits video, export as transparent WebP and the chart drops onto existing footage with no background to key out.

Teams routinely miss this and end up screen-recording or masking a black rectangle. See exporting and sharing.

Attaching a hundred logos one at a time is nobody's idea of a good afternoon. Select the first empty image cell and upload the entire set at once — files are sorted by filename and filled down the column in that order, so 01.jpg through 100.jpg land exactly where you expect.

Filling stops at the first cell that already holds an image, so earlier choices are never overwritten.

When the leader is ten times the size of everyone else, a linear scale is honest and unreadable — every other bar is a stub.

Bar Width Scale set to logarithmic keeps the smaller bars visible while the leader still leads. Worth knowing before you conclude your data "does not work as a race".

Set Value Animation to rolling digits and numbers spin like an odometer instead of snapping to each new value.

It costs nothing at render time and makes the counting part of the motion. It is the single cheapest thing you can do to make a race feel produced.

Not everything needs to be a video. Any chart type can render as a static infographic — a single still frame, one data point per entity, no animation or intro.

For slide decks and social posts this is often what you actually wanted, and it renders far faster than a video.

A static frame is fine for a thirty-second race. Past a minute, viewers lose track of what to watch.

Automatic zoom responds to the race itself — pushing in on rank changes and milestones — and will catch overtakes you would otherwise have to find and time by hand. See the zoom guide.

Alien Art Charts exposes an MCP server, so AI assistants that support it can create projects, add layers, populate spreadsheets, and trigger renders directly.

For a technical team this turns a recurring chart into something scriptable. See the MCP integration.

The statistics library holds prepared datasets — population, GDP, YouTube channels, and more.

For training a team it removes the "we are still waiting on the data" blocker entirely. People can learn the editor today and bring their own data tomorrow.