Settings — the complete reference | ATX AnalyticsTable Handbook

Settings — the complete referenceTwenty-one sections, and the one rule that explains all of them: a setting takes effect where it is read, and is stored where it belongs. Settings opens as a panel over the workspace with a navigation rail down the left and one section at a time on the right. Two things are worth knowing before any individual option: changes apply as you make them rather than when you close the panel, so Save & close only closes it and Cancel does not roll anything back; and settings are not all stored in the same place. Some belong to the machine, some follow the user, some travel inside the project file, and secrets never leave the encrypted vault. That split is deliberate — a laptop opening a project built on a thirty-two-core server must not inherit its thread count, while a report's refresh timeout must travel with the report.

What it does

Appearance — dark and light themes, four presets, accent colour and panel tint, typography, and the interface-language picker: English, German, Spanish, French, Polish, Portuguese and Simplified Chinese, with a coverage percentage beside any partial translation
Locale defaults — separators taken from the operating system, from a named region, or set by hand, plus default decimals, date and time patterns, with per-project and per-cell overrides winning over them
Custom palettes — up to ten five-colour palettes, exported and imported as JSON or auto-loaded from a path or URL, appearing in every colour picker
Connections — every database, warehouse, file and object-store connection, each with a test, a default marker, and a passphrase-encrypted export bundle for rolling a standard set across a team
Email — mail profiles for sending and reading, covered in the next chapter
Semantic objects — datasets, dimensions, measures, calculated members, joins, filters and parameters, with validation, dead-reference detection and lineage
Sync & conflicts — sync status and a conflict inbox showing both versions side by side so a resolution is chosen deliberately
Query & Grid — default page size, the pinned-row limit, the static-pin warning threshold, auto-run on table click, editor soft wrap
Export — a size limit per format, refused before anything is written rather than halfway through: CSV and TXT 64 MB, XLSX 32 MB, JSON and NDJSON 128 MB, Parquet 256 MB, PDF 192 MB, each raisable to 384 MB
Logging — level, file output, folder, rotation size and file count, a disk ceiling, test lines and a delete button, all applied to the running backend without a restart
Git Provider — provider, API base URL, repository, username and a vault-held token with a validation button
Identity (Entra ID) — the directory and app registration this installation signs in with, held once rather than retyped on every connection, plus the credential source used by Entra database connections
License — status, everything the licence includes and excludes, usage against declared capacity, and install, preview, re-check and remove
Advanced — query timeout, scheduled-refresh timeout, background job concurrency, DuckDB threads and memory, a per-project database size limit, autosave, recalculation on open, and settings export and import
Network — corporate proxy, proxy sign-in, TLS-inspection certificates and a connection test, shown with where each value in force came from
Backup & restore — one encrypted file holding your personal settings, saved connections, semantic objects, mail profiles and AI settings with their passwords, to move to another computer or a rebuilt profile; projects are backed up separately
Access — object-level sharing on a server: defaults per kind of object, Manage access, an access review downloadable as CSV and Check access for a named person
Data access — row- and column-level security of the open project: your own effective access, and for administrators and policy owners the policy editor, Validate, Preview as a persona and Show what runs
Catalog & usage — every sheet, dashboard, report, pipeline and query the installation knows, with lineage, four-eyes certification and a usage report (chapter 27)
MCP servers & API — the MCP servers available to the REST API and Ask Greg, and the public API's OpenAPI document (chapter 25)
Audit log — the tamper-evident, hash-chained record of who did what, with filters, Verify integrity and a JSON Lines download, for those the server allows to read it
About & support — the build number, and links to the release page, the bug form, the feature-request form and the support portal

How it works

A control writes its value the moment you change it. Save & close records that settings were saved and closes the panel; Cancel closes it. Nothing is buffered, so there is nothing to discard.
Machine-local settings stay on the machine: background job concurrency, DuckDB thread count and memory limit are explicitly excluded from anything that travels, because they describe hardware rather than intent.
Language files live in a user-writable folder outside the install directory — %APPDATA%\AnalyticsTable\LANGUAGES on Windows, ~/.config/AnalyticsTable/LANGUAGES on Linux, ~/Library/Application Support/AnalyticsTable/LANGUAGES on macOS — and Appearance prints the exact path for the machine. The six shipped translations are copied there on first start, so they survive updates; edit one and it becomes yours, later updates leave it alone, and deleting your copy restores the shipped file. ANALYTICS_LANGUAGES_DIR moves the whole folder.
A language is identified by the meta.code inside the file rather than by its name, and a file without one is ignored. A partial translation is perfectly usable: anything it leaves out falls back to English, and the picker shows the coverage percentage so a half-finished file is obvious rather than mysterious.
User-profile settings follow the person — theme, palette, typography, recent projects and folders, connection definitions with their secrets blanked.
Project settings travel inside the project file: the scheduled-refresh timeout and the project's own database size limit belong to the report, not to whoever opens it.
Secrets go to the encrypted vault and are write-only from the interface. A stored password can be replaced but never read back, because there is no endpoint that returns one.
Server-held settings — logging, mail profiles, the licence, the application sign-in configuration — are configured once per installation, and the sign-in configuration goes read-only when environment variables own it, so a deployment cannot be quietly re-pointed from inside the app.
Locale resolution runs highest-first: a per-cell format beats a per-project override, which beats these global defaults. Changing a default here only affects projects that have not set their own.
A connector or a mail provider the licence excludes stays visible in its list, disabled and labelled, rather than disappearing — removing it leaves somebody hunting for it and concluding the build is broken.

Practices that keep it reliable

Configure one machine, export the settings, and import them across the team — secrets are excluded unless you deliberately include them, so each machine still enters its own credentials once
Raise an export size limit only as far as the machine can take it; the limit exists so an over-large export fails before it writes rather than during
Turn logging up to debug for the length of a problem and back down afterwards — the disk ceiling protects you, but trace-level logs are not pleasant to read
Set the scheduled-refresh timeout on the project rather than hoping the default fits: a five-hour overnight query needs to say so
Adding a language? Start from Appearance → Export English template, translate the ribbon first and ship it — the rest falls back to English and the coverage percentage tracks the progress

In a regulated environment

Settings and connection definitions export as JSON so a standard configuration is rolled out rather than retyped, and the connections bundle can carry secrets under a passphrase when that is what a migration needs.
The identity section holds the tenant and app registration once for the whole installation, so a rotated app registration is one edit rather than a hunt through the connection list — and the redirect URI is shown rather than assumed, because the packaged desktop app's port changes between runs.
Application sign-in can require a signed-in user for every request and run queries as that user, so row-level security and the database's own audit trail are theirs rather than the workstation's.
The licence panel lists every module, component, data source and limit, included and not, so an administrator can see exactly what an installation is entitled to without decoding a file. Core modules are marked as always included: a licence able to hide them could never be replaced by the customer.
Logging writes JSON lines, one object per line, so an installation can ship them to a log collector with no transformation step.
A translation is data rather than a build, so a regional rollout does not wait on a product release. The loader checks each file as it loads: SQL keywords and ${…} parameters must survive translation, and a string that lost one keeps its English text rather than generating SQL nobody can run. Plural categories follow CLDR — Polish needs four where English needs two — so counts read correctly instead of being forced into an English shape.
Accessibility currently shares the Appearance controls; reduce-motion and high-contrast preferences are carried in the user profile and honoured by the interface.

Screens

Settings — a rail of sections on the left, one at a time on the right, and changes that take effect as you make them.
Query & Grid — page size, the pinned-row limit, and the threshold at which a large static load stops to warn you.
Export — a size limit per format, checked before anything is written, and a button that puts them all back.
Logging — level, rotation and a disk ceiling, applied to the running backend without restarting anything.
Advanced — engine limits that stay on the machine, timeouts that travel with the project, autosave, and settings export.
License — status, seats, and every module, component, data source and limit this licence does and does not include.

Glossary terms on this page

KPI dashboard: definition

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