AI that writes the formula you would rather not remember

Two ways to get a formula, and the second one is the useful one

Describe it. Type "flag rows where the invoice date is more than 30 days before today and the status is not paid" into the formula editor and the formula is written for you, in TableDI's own 82-function language, against the actual columns of the actual table — so column names are real and the formula runs rather than needing to be adapted.

Or answer four questions. Eight guided panels — Vlookup, Match, Split, Merge, Summarize, Dedupe, Combine duplicates, Split date-time — walk through the operation in four steps and write the formula at the end. No prompt, no API key, no model: they work on the free tier and they are deterministic. For the operations people actually repeat, this is faster and more reliable than describing anything. How the panels work.

The formula stays visible and editable either way. Nothing is hidden behind a wizard you cannot open again, which matters six months later when the number looks wrong and somebody has to work out why.

What a web formula generator cannot do

• See your columns. A generator that has never met your table writes =VLOOKUP(A2, Sheet2!A:B, 2, FALSE) and leaves you to map it onto reality. In the app the formula references your columns by name because the AI was given them.
• Run it. A generated formula is a guess until it executes. Here it lands in a column, calculates on every row, and you see the result and the errors immediately.
• Keep running it. A formula column recalculates for rows added next month. A formula pasted into a sheet is a snapshot of one afternoon's problem.
• Go inside a formula. ai.generate is a function, so the model runs per row — classify five thousand free-text descriptions into categories, extract a city out of an address field. web.crawl, google.search and http.request work the same way, pulling outside data into cells.

Bring your own key, and what that means

AI features need an API key you supply, entered in Desktop settings (Cmd+, on macOS / Ctrl+, on Windows). Requests go from your machine straight to that provider. TableDI has no server in the path and never sees the key, the prompt or the data. Enter no key and no AI request is ever made — the app is fully usable that way, and the guided panels still work.

What this is not: local AI. The model runs at your provider, so the columns you point it at travel to them under the account you hold. What stays local is everything else — the workspace, the tables, the files, the calculations. Setting up a key.

Where it gets things wrong

Worth knowing before you trust output:

• Ambiguous requests produce confident wrong formulas. "Total by region" does not say whether blanks count, so check the first few rows against something you can verify by hand.
• It writes TableDI formulas, not Excel formulas. The 82-function library overlaps heavily with Excel's but is not identical, and a formula from here does not paste into Excel.
• Per-row AI functions cost per row. ai.generate down a 50,000-row column is 50,000 requests billed by your provider. Try it on a filtered view first.

What it costs

The AI plugins are on the paid tier; the model usage is billed by your own provider. The guided formula panels, all 82 functions, the formula editor and every view type are on the free tier, which is not a trial and does not expire. The split.