Excel & Spreadsheets

Insight O' Mate natively supports querying Excel workbooks (.xlsx, .xlsm) and CSV files directly from your local machine.

No database server, connection string, or credentials are required. Simply open or drag & drop a file to start querying in natural language.

How it works

1. Opening a spreadsheet: Click Open a spreadsheet on the home screen or drag & drop any .xlsx, .xlsm, or .csv file onto the app window.
2. Sheet mapping: Each worksheet in an Excel file maps to a collection (just like a database table/collection). CSV files map as a single collection named after the filename.
3. Header row detection: The sidecar automatically scans the top 20 rows of each sheet to find the primary column header row, filtering out logos, title banners, and blank spacer rows.
4. Data type coercion:
   • Currency symbols ($1,234.50, ₹1,23,456, €500) are coerced to numbers.
   • Negative parenthetical notation (500) is converted to -500.
   • Percentage strings 45% are converted to 0.45 for accurate math.
   • ISO dates and Excel date serials become native Date objects.

Live reload on edit

The sidecar checks the spreadsheet file's modification time (mtimeMs) before executing every query. Editing a sheet in Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, or VS Code and re-running a prompt immediately uses the updated data without needing a manual reconnect.

Cross-sheet joins

You can perform multi-sheet queries (such as joining an Orders sheet with a Customers sheet). The local aggregation engine executes hash joins between sheets automatically based on entity key relationships.

Privacy invariant

Your spreadsheet files never leave your computer. Only column header names and sheet names are transmitted to the cloud NLP engine to perform intent analysis.