Every spreadsheet eventually reaches the point where the question in your head is easy to say and annoying to answer. How much revenue did we do in Germany last quarter? Which orders are missing an email? What’s Theta Group’s shipping address? You know exactly what you want. Getting it means a nested formula, a pivot table, or four clicks through a filter builder — and then undoing all of it before you can ask the next question.
Today we’re shipping Tablitsa Ask Data: type the question, get the answer. It’s available now on every plan, from the Ask Data button on the AI toolbar above any sheet.
What is Ask Data?
Ask Data is natural language querying for your spreadsheet. You ask a question in plain English, and Tablitsa answers it against the real rows in your sheet — as an exact calculated number, a specific looked-up value, the table filtered to matching rows, or a grouped breakdown. There are no formulas to write and no pivot table to configure. It works on one sheet at a time, and it is included with every Tablitsa plan — the Free plan gives you 3 questions a day, and Pro and Team raise that considerably.
What kinds of questions can you ask?
Ask Data understands four shapes of question. They combine naturally, so you rarely have to think about which one you’re asking.
- Look up a value. “What’s the email and phone for Acme Corp?” It reads the fields back to you and filters the table to that row.
- Get an exact number. Totals, counts, averages, highest and lowest — “total revenue”, “average order value”, “total inventory of Widget Pro”.
- Filter the table. “Rows where total amount > 1000”, “orders with status pending”, “rows missing an email”. The grid filters in place, so you can keep working with the result.
- Get a breakdown. “Count of orders by status”, “total revenue by category”, “top 5 countries by revenue”.
Conditions stack the way you’d say them out loud: “total quantity of Widget Pro for Alpha Dynamics” is one question, not three. Matching is case-insensitive, so widget pro finds Widget Pro.
Are the answers exact, or estimated?
Exact. This is the part we care about most, because it’s where tools like this usually quietly let you down. When Ask Data gives you a number, that number is computed across every matching row in the sheet — no sampling, no cap, no “based on the first 1,000 rows”. A total on a million-row sheet is the real total.
What is capped is how much we put on screen at once. Filtering shows up to 10,000 matching rows, and when more match, Ask Data tells you the true count anyway (“filtered to the first 10,000 of 47,310 matching rows”). Value lookups show up to 200 rows. In short: the answer is always correct, only the view is paginated.
Can you see how the answer was calculated?
Yes. An answer you can’t verify isn’t worth much. Under every response there’s a Show SQL toggle that reveals the exact query used to produce it. If a number looks off, you can see precisely how it was calculated instead of guessing at what the AI understood. Your past questions are saved in the query history, so a question you worked out once is one click away next time.
Is it safe to let an AI query your data?
Worth being explicit about, since “AI writes SQL against my database” is a reasonable thing to be nervous about. The model never writes a query that we run. It only authors a small JSON plan — which columns to summarize, how to group, and a single filter condition. Tablitsa builds the actual SQL from that plan, validates the filter against your sheet’s real columns, and rejects anything outside the contract. Queries run read-only. There is no path from a question to a modified sheet.
Try it
Open any sheet, hit Ask Data in the AI toolbar, and tap one of the example prompts to see the shape of it. Then ask it something only you would know to ask. You don’t need a paid plan to try it.
Each question counts toward your plan’s daily and monthly AI limits — see the docs for the details, and the full list of what Ask Data can and can’t do.