User guide

The guide is sorted by what you want to do, not by where you do it. Each topic starts with a table of its jobs and where each one lives: in the app, on the command line, and as an MCP tool for AI agents.

New to Octa? Start with First Steps, or browse Common tasks for complete walk-throughs.

Topic	What it covers
Open files	Opening files and folders, very large files, awkward files and the tabs they land in.
Connect	Cloud storage, live databases and REST APIs, browsed in a sidebar and opened like files.
View and find	Moving around a table, finding rows, highlighting what matters and the other ways to display a file.
Edit and reshape	Changing cells, columns and the shape of a table, with undo for all of it.
Clean and protect	Finding what is wrong with a table, fixing it, and making it safe to share.
Combine and split	Putting tables together, finding how they fit, and taking them apart again.
Analyse	Statistics, frequencies, time series, charts and reports from the table in front of you.
Compare and history	Differences between files, versions and servers, and how a table changed over time.
Save and export	Writing back, converting to another format, and exporting for other people.
SQL and assistant	Querying with DuckDB SQL, and asking a language model about your data in plain words.
Automate	Doing the same job again without clicking through it: recipes, batches, scripts and agents.