Help · Formula panel
The formula panel: VLOOKUP without writing VLOOKUP
The thing you were faking with nested VLOOKUPs, done in four steps — and the formula it writes stays visible, so you can read it, edit it, and stop needing the panel.
Why columns, not cells
A formula in TableDI belongs to a column, not to a cell. You define it once and it applies to every row — including the rows you paste in next month. Nothing to drag down, nothing that silently stops at row 4,312 because someone inserted a row.
The consequence worth internalizing: keep the raw column, derive the clean one. Your imported
Region column stays exactly as exported; a second column holds
UPPER(TRIM(Region)). Next month's messy export is then already handled.
The guided panels
Open Formulas in a table's toolbar, or use the named buttons next to it.
- Match — pull a field from another table by a shared key. This is the VLOOKUP replacement: pick the two tables, pick the column they have in common, pick what to bring across. It doesn't break when a column moves, because it references columns by identity rather than by position.
- Sumif — total one column wherever a condition holds. "Revenue, but only the paid invoices." Also counts, averages, minimums and maximums.
- Split — one column into several, on a separator. Full names, addresses, "Region / Sub-region" strings.
- Merge — several columns into one, with whatever you want between them.
- if — a conditional column. Overdue or not, above target or not, flagged or not.
Each panel is four steps and shows a preview before you commit. When you're done, the formula is written into the column and shown in the formula bar — that's the point. You can edit it directly next time.
Ask AI for the formula instead
The panels also have an Ask AI option: describe what you want in a sentence — "sum revenue by month, but only the paid invoices" — and get a formula back. It appears in the formula bar like any other, so you can read what it produced and correct it rather than trusting a black box. Needs your own API key (setup).
Writing formulas directly
Columns are addressed by code — AA3 is the third column of table
AA, and the codes are shown in each column header. That means a formula can
reference another table without any of the cross-file gymnastics:
| What you want | Formula |
|---|---|
| Tidy a messy text column | UPPER(TRIM(AA4)) |
| Month out of an ISO date | LEFT(AA2, 7) |
| Count only what matches | IF(UPPER(TRIM(AA7)) = "PAID", AA6, 0) |
| Total from another table by key | SUMIF(AA6, AB1 = AA9) |
| Rows matching a value | COUNTIF(AA2, AB1 = AA9) |
Around sixty functions are available, and the Formulas panel lists them with examples. The sample workspace (Start with sample data) uses the five above, so you can open it and look at working versions rather than starting from a blank column.
A summary table built from another table
Make a new table whose first column's formula points at a column in the source table. It
will hold one row per distinct value found there — one row per month, per region, per
customer — and then SUMIF and COUNTIF fill the rest. That's a
pivot you can build charts on and keep adding columns to. The sample workspace's
Monthly summary is exactly this, in five columns.
Still stuck? Email us — one inbox, read by the people who build TableDI.