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Octa

Octa main window in Table view

Octa is a native desktop application for viewing and editing tabular data files. It opens Parquet, CSV, JSON, SQLite, DuckDB, Excel, and around twenty more formats (log files among them) in a fast spreadsheet-like view, with sorting, filtering, full-text search, inline editing, SQL queries, and file comparison.

It also doubles as a command-line tool and an MCP server, so models like Claude can answer questions about your local files.

Get Octa First Steps

What you can do

The user guide is sorted by task. Each topic lists its jobs with where to find them in the app, on the command line, and as an MCP tool.

  • Open files

    Parquet, CSV, Excel, SQLite, a PDF's tables, a log file: Octa works out the format and opens it in a table. Files bigger than memory stream in the background.

    Open files

  • Connect

    Browse S3, Azure, GCS, SFTP and WebDAV, twelve live database engines and REST APIs in a sidebar, and open what you find like a local file.

    Connect

  • View and find

    Sort, filter, search, mark and bookmark rows, or switch to a raw text, JSON tree, map, timeline or record view.

    View and find

  • Edit and reshape

    Edit cells inline, add columns from formulas, change types, pivot and transpose, with undo for every step.

    Edit and reshape

  • Clean and protect

    Find duplicates, outliers, missing values and personal data, fix them, and anonymise a table before you share it.

    Clean and protect

  • Combine and split

    Union, join, fuzzy and spatial joins, the key finder and the relationship map, merging edited copies, and splitting into files.

    Combine and split

  • Analyse

    Summaries, value counts, correlations, time buckets, charts, forecasts and a shareable HTML report.

    Analyse

  • Compare and history

    Diff two files or a file and a server table, spot schema and data drift, and follow a cell back through Git.

    Compare and history

  • Save and export

    Save back, convert to another format, export to PDF, a workbook or DDL, and keep earlier versions.

    Save and export

  • SQL and assistant

    Query any open file with DuckDB SQL, or ask a language model about your data in plain words.

    SQL and assistant

  • Automate

    Record a clean-up once and replay it as a recipe, convert whole folders, and script it all from the shell.

    Automate

  • Command line

    Every job that makes sense headless is an octa --flag, with TSV, CSV or JSON output for pipelines.

    Command line

  • MCP server

    octa --mcp lets Claude Desktop, Claude Code or any MCP client read, query and (if you allow it) edit your local files.

    MCP server

Where to next

Octa is open source (MIT) and the source lives at github.com/thorstenfoltz/octa.