Ctrlk
For the complete documentation index, see llms.txt. This page is also available as Markdown.

What Tabular Review Can and Cannot Do Today

Learn how to rename a column, change the question it asks, set its Source and Format separately, and manage every column in Tabular Review from one view.

Summary

A clear account of what a table in Tabular Review does today and where its limits are, so a review is planned around them rather than interrupted by them.

Why This is Important

Tabular Review is used for the largest reviews a team runs, which is exactly where discovering a limit halfway through costs the most. This article states the current boundaries in one place.

What a Table Does

  • Reads every document in a connected collection in parallel and extracts what you asked for into a structured grid.

  • Links every cell to the passage it came from, which you can open and follow into the source document.

  • Lets you build columns by describing what you need in plain language, or define them yourself.

  • Lets you correct any cell, with the correction visibly distinct from Vincent's answer and revertible.

  • Lets you manage every column in one view: name, question, Source, Format, order, deletion, individually or in bulk.

  • Lets you consolidate several documents into a single row.

  • Lets you ask the table follow-up questions in conversation, and draft work product from the findings.

  • Exports to CSV or Excel, and saves the structure as a template your organization can reuse.

What a Table Cannot Do

A table cannot be shared. There is no way to invite a colleague to a table as a contributor or a viewer. A table is created inside one person's conversation, and the only way to involve someone else is to export it, at which point the citations and the document viewer are left behind.

  • No activity log on the table. The table holds no record of who checked which cell. Corrections are visible; who made them is not recorded in the table.

  • No commenting on a cell. A question about a particular value has to be raised outside the table.

  • No co-editing. Two people cannot work in the same table at once.

  • Template sharing is not table sharing. A table's structure can be saved as a template and shared across your organization. The table itself, with its documents and answers, cannot.

Export and Capacity

  • Excel export. The Excel export is a renamed CSV. Typed columns arrive as text, and dates need reformatting by hand.

  • No Word export. Export is to CSV or Excel only.

Best Practices & Pro Tips

Decide who runs the table and who reads the results before you start. Because a table cannot be shared, a review where one person sets it up and another evaluates the substance has to be planned around a single account or an export. Knowing that at the outset is cheaper than discovering it at the end of a large review.

Set column formats before the run, and check the export early. Export the first few rows and look at them in Excel before the full review. If dates and numbers arrive as text, you will want to know before there are four hundred rows to reformat.

Last updated

Was this helpful?