With Equals you can connect, analyze, and report on live data from the comfort of your spreadsheet. This guide will walk you through Equals' core concepts and features to help you hit the ground running.

For a quick walkthrough of Equals, check out our demo.

The basics

Workspaces

An Equals workspace is your company account and the home base for all workbooks, datasources, queries, and views relating to an individual company. By enabling auto-join from Settings > Workspace, you can ensure that users with email addresses from your same domain will be automatically added to your workspace upon account creation.

For more on workspace settings and configuration, go to our workspace setup guide.

Workbooks

Equal workbooks are fully-featured spreadsheets that can connect directly to your datasources. Workbooks come with all the spreadsheet fundamentals including functions, shortcuts, pivot tables, and charts. You can also work with AI Assist for help with building and refining your analysis.

By connecting your workbook to a supported datasource, you can query and analyze live data from the comfort of your spreadsheet. You can auto-expand your tables to refresh with each query run, ensuring that your analysis is always up-to-date without the need to manually copy & paste data or adjust data ranges.

To create a workbook from scratch, just select New > Workbook from the upper right hand corner of your Equals home screen.

Currently, workbooks support a maximum of 500,000 rows.

Connectors

Equals supports 30+ connectors - including databases, data warehouses, and frequently used apps - with no ETL-wrangling required. Datasource connections are configured at the workspace level, and can be shared with your entire workspace or with individual users.

View all your available connectors by going to Datasources from the Equals home screen. To add a new datasource, click the New datasource button on the top right corner of the page and follow the provided instructions (or check out our configuration guides).

Queries

You can write queries directly from any Equals workbook to pull live data from a connected datasource into your workbook. You can use our no-code query builder or feature-rich SQL editor to build a query, with support for joins as well as filters, limits and sorts.

To create a query, open the Connections panel from the top right corner of any Equals workbook. Then, connect to a datasource that has already been configured for your workspace, and select whether to use the SQL editor or query builder.

Queries are available on all current pricing plans.

Dashboards

Every Equals workbook includes a dashboard, which allows you to transform your analysis into a live, board-ready report. Equals dashboards can be auto-distributed to any destination (Slack, Google slides, or email) on a custom schedule, or exported as a one-time PDF.

To create a dashboard, simply open any workbook and go to the pre-existing Dashboard tab. Then, add individual cells, tables, charts, from your analysis to your dashboard. You can also add AI-generated executive summaries. These objects refresh based on any scheduled queries in the workbook, ensuring your dashboard always reflects the most recent data.

Dashboards are included on all current pricing plans.

Connect to data

Import scripts

Beyond supported datasources, import scripts can be used to build custom integrations by pulling in data from third party APIs. Import scripts can be written using either Javascript (Node 16) or Python (3.9). As a starting point, check out example import scripts for datasources like Airtable, Typeform, Github and more.

Views

With views you can transform raw data from any datasource into a simpler, analysis-ready table. Once saved, views sync to your underlying data schema and can be directly queried from any workbook for further analysis. Views are great for ensuring consistency in the way metrics are defined and tracked - just define them once, then use them anywhere.

Explore data

SQL editor

Equals' full-featured SQL editor allows you to write and run a traditional SQL query directly from any Equals workbook.

To get started, first configure a datasource for your workspace. Then, open the Connections panel in the top right corner of any workbook, select the datasource you'd like to query, and then select the SQL editor.

Query builder

If you don't know SQL, you can still query any supported datasource using the drag-and-drop query builder. The query builder supports common SQL statements such as joins and sorts.

Queries built using the query builder can be converted to a traditional SQL query at any time by switching from the query builder to the SQL editor.

To get started, first configure a datasource for your workspace. Then, open the Connections panel in the top right corner of any workbook, select the datasource you'd like to query, and then select the query builder.

Restoring queries

With query version history, Equals keeps a copy of every query and the resulting data that was returned from the query to make it easy to track and restore changes.

To restore any query run and its associated data, simply click the 🔄 icon in the top right corner of the SQL editor or query builder, navigate to the version of your query you'd like to restore, and then hit Restore. To restore the query without changing the associated output data, select Restore query only

Scheduling queries

With query scheduling you can automatically pull new data into your workbook either once an hour, day or week. When the scheduled query runs it will update all formulas that depend on the updated data.

Query scheduling is available on all current pricing plans, however scheduling options differ by plan. The Good plan offers daily query scheduling; the Better plan adds options for hourly and weekly query scheduling.

To schedule a query click Schedule below the Run Query button at the bottom of the SQL editor or query builder.

Saved queries

Saved queries enable workspace members to share commonly-used queries. Changes to a saved query will automatically update across all workbooks in which that saved query is used, ensuring that data is pulled consistently across multiple analyses.

Saved queries can only be accessed by workspace members who have access to the underlying datasource. Saved queries can also be shared with the entire workspace or individual users on a View only or Can edit basis.

Analyze data

Auto-expand

With auto-expand you can configure analyses (tables, charts, and pivot tables) to automatically refresh and expand (or contract) with each query run. This is useful for ensuring that analyses are up-to-date without the need to manually copy & paste data or expand ranges on your charts and tables.

Calculated columns

With calculated columns, you can attach columns to your data that expand and contract with each query run. This is useful for automating transformations that you must apply to queried data before using it in analysis, such as extracting dates or summing the value of multiple columns.

To create a calculated column, simply enter a formula in a column directly adjacent to your queried data. The formula will auto-fill to the length of the column and stay up-to-date with each query run, without the need to manually copy & paste formulas down.

AI Assist

Powered by Open AI's GPT-4 Turbo, AI Assist can help you write, edit, and fix SQL queries, formulas, charts, and more directly from your Equals workbook. You can ask AI Assist for help with anything in your workbook — AI Assist will also automatically detect and surface fixes for errors in your queries and formulas.

Just hit Cmd/Ctrl + J to chat with AI Assist, or Cmd/Ctrl+K to open AI Assist from the command bar.

Command bar

Equals has a built-in command bar that allows you to easily discover and access any workbook command (and AI Assist) with a single keyboard shortcut. These include all commands related to workbook formatting, navigation, editing, and sorting/filtering.

Simply press Cmd/Ctrl+K to open the command bar. From there, start typing in any command to get auto-complete suggestions. You can also enter a custom prompt for AI Assist or select a suggested prompt.

Keyboard shortcuts

Your keyboard is the fastest way to edit your Equals workbook. Equals supports the full range of spreadsheet shortcuts you would expect coming from Excel or Google Sheets. These are a few of the most helpful:

Cmd/Ctrl + Z to Undo
Cmd/Ctrl + Y to Redo
F4 to toggle cell locks
Ctrl + Space to select column
Shift + Space to select row
option (Mac) or Shift + Alt (Windows) to enter alt mode

Report on data

Dashboard destinations

By configuring dashboard destinations, you can send dashboards to Slack, email, and Google Slides on a custom schedule. Dashboards will be sent to their destinations as snapshots, showing the most recent view of any tables, charts and cells.

Scheduling query runs together with dashboard sends will ensure that your dashboard is refreshed and distributed to stakeholders on a cadence that works for your team.