Cleaning and calculating

Set field types first; five panels compute without you writing a formula; hand-written formulas and panels end up as the same thing; summary tables grow out of detail tables.

1. Field types — text, numeric, percent, checkbox, date, dropdown, attachment, QR codeEvery column has one field type, and it decides how the value is stored, how it displays and what it can take part in. What each of the eight is for, where to change it, and what goes wrong when it is set incorrectly.
2. The formula panelsSumif, Match, Split, Merge and if in the toolbar are the main way to calculate without writing a formula. Each is numbered steps with a live preview, producing a formula column or a new table — and each can be filled in by AI.
3. Match — the cross-table lookupPull columns from another table on a shared key. The panel's steps, what it does when several rows match, the xlookup and sumif it writes, and why it beats VLOOKUP on all four counts.
4. Summarize — grouped totalsGroup by one column and aggregate others into a new table. Ten aggregate operations, and why the result is a live table rather than a snapshot.
5. Merge and Split — stacking tables and pulling rows outMerge stacks several tables of the same shape into one; Split pulls the rows matching a condition into a new table. Both produce live tables that follow their sources. Plus when to use Split rather than a view filter.
6. Conditional ifLabel or pick a value per row by condition. The panel's three steps, the formula it writes, five worked examples, and the three conditions that silently never match.
7. Duplicates — mark, remove, combineThree different needs that all sound like "deduplicate": flag the repeated rows, produce a list with no repeats, or collapse several rows for one customer into one with the numbers added up. Plus how this differs from a primary key.
8. Dates and times — splitting, formatting, offsetsPull year-month, week and quarter out of a date column; normalise a column where dates were written five different ways; offsets and differences; and the date table that grows by itself.
9. Writing formulas by handWhere the formula editor is, the syntax rules in one table, the three kinds of function you will actually use, and the five reasons a formula comes back empty.
10. Growing a summary table out of a detail tableTableDI's version of a pivot table, except it is a real table — you can add columns to it, reference it from elsewhere, chart it and export it. Two steps to build one, plus how to group on two dimensions.
11. Filter, sort and which fields showThree things that change the display and never the data. Every comparator, the time-range shortcuts, advanced filters with and/or, multi-column sorting, hiding columns, and the "filter current row" shortcut.
12. The Workflow graphOne picture of which column feeds which. Use it to trace where a number came from, to check what depends on a column before changing it, and to understand a template someone else built.
13. The Tools pageThe same capabilities as the toolbar panels, entered from the other end — pick the table (or upload a file) first. Every card, what it does, and where it is documented in full.