View, Work, and Save Your Live, Governed Data, Without Ever Exporting It
Every analyst has a version of this “Monday blues.” A leader pings asking for the quarterly forecast, wants it broken out by region, and needs it for a call in thirty minutes.
The fastest way to do this? Pull the data out of your tool, paste it into Excel, and build the report there.
Thirty minutes later, you've got the report: three new formula columns, a pivot view summarizing the regional split, and conditional formatting flagging the outliers.
You save it as "Q3_Forecast_v2_FINAL.xlsx" and send it off. Nobody in that email thread stops to think about where the file came from, or can they find it when they need to verify the numbers in a month
Now multiply that by every analyst on your team, every deadline of the quarter: that's hundreds of files living outside the analytics tool.
The report didn't disappear. It just stopped being the governed data the rest of the business, and your AI agents, can actually rely on.
ThoughtSpot Spreadsheets on Live Data is built to solve this enterprise governance challenge. It's your familiar spreadsheet interface built right into ThoughtSpot, so you can work directly on your live, governed data.
With ThoughtSpot Spreadsheets, you can:
Work in a familiar spreadsheet-like interface
Update the numbers in real-time
Share your work or publish to the warehouse directly
Why Is the Export Habit So Hard to Break?
You didn't build that spreadsheet muscle memory overnight. Years of using formulas, shortcuts, and pivot tables got you to a place where a spreadsheet is simply the fastest way you know to work on data.
That habit is worth keeping. What shouldn't have to come with it is the ungoverned export.
Analytics tools have gotten very good at answering questions. But when you need to add assumptions, make adjustments, or work with new inputs, the workflow often moves to a spreadsheet on someone’s laptop, disconnected from the live, governed data.
This export creates a critical gap. The forecast a leader will present, the target the team commits to, the adjustment that changes the plan all of it gets built on a copy of the data, disconnected from the security, lineage, and freshness that made the original worth trusting.
And every time the numbers change, someone has to manually rebuild the report, or the business ends up making decisions using numbers that nobody can trace.
How ThoughtSpot Spreadsheets Bring the Best of Both Worlds
1. A Spreadsheet Grid on Your Live Data
Open any existing data model in a familiar spreadsheet grid, queried straight from your warehouse of choice. Sort, filter, build formulas with 70+ native functions, and apply conditional formatting. No need to export as a CSV or XLS to view locally. That means the 20 minutes you used to spend exporting and reformatting your Excel before you could even start working is no longer required.
2. Publish Your Inputs Straight to the Warehouse
You can create new input tables and add new columns to the data model you’re already working with. Whether you are entering a forecast, a set of numbers you copied from another source, or just lines of unstructured notes, you can publish it to your warehouse in one click using ThoughtSpot’s Writeback feature, with no export or manual re-upload.
Once you publish, it’s warehouse data, ready for Spotter, Liveboards, or any other tool that uses the data as a source to work with.
*Writeback is available in beta today, with support for Snowflake. Other warehouses coming soon.
3. Share Your Work and Make it Accessible for Everyone
Save your spreadsheet as a governed Answer, and it stops being that Excel file that exists only on your laptop. Other analysts in your team no longer have to wait for your response or rebuild it themselves. They can directly view, edit, and collaborate on your saved answer, making your work searchable knowledge.
4. Enterprise Scale, Security, and Governance, All Built In
ThoughtSpot Spreadsheets is built to handle enterprise data. Open and work on millions of rows of numbers without your browser grinding to a halt.
Because every spreadsheet is built on top of a governed ThoughtSpot Model, any relevant row-level security (RLS), column-level security (CLS), and role-based access controls (RBAC) all carry over automatically.
This way, a regional sales head only sees the numbers they’re allowed to see and nothing else.
Every saved Answer is auditable, so your data team can always trace who changed the number and when.
How Can Business Teams Get Value From Spreadsheets?
Use Case 1: FP&A Analyst in B2B SaaS
For an FP&A analyst presenting software spend across business units to the finance leader, performing the variance analysis was possible within the tool. They could pull the numbers, add a formula for variance against the allotted budget, and see exactly which business unit was running over.
The real challenge was in adding new inputs to the model. Pasting the revised forecast into the table meant a CSV export and a separate Excel file on their laptop, disconnected from the governed model.
With ThoughtSpot Spreadsheets on Live Data, the FP&A analyst can add the forecast as a new input column right in the same spreadsheet table and publish it back to Snowflake via Writeback with no Excel download, no manual re-upload. The report they built becomes the source the whole team works from.
Use Case 2: Sales Ops Analyst in Retail
A sales ops analyst at a fast-growing D2C retailer keeps getting the same question from different regional sales heads: which products are moving, and which ones are quietly sitting on the shelf.
With the familiar spreadsheet experience inside ThoughtSpot Search Data, the analyst can open the sales model, add a formula for units sold per week, and flag the slow-moving products in red so the pattern is obvious at a glance. All of this can be done in a minute.
To make the work really useful for the sales teams, the analyst saves and shares that view as a governed Answer.
The Bottom Line - What’s Next for You?
Your data teams and analysts are comfortable working on a spreadsheet. They shouldn't have to worry about whether the number is current, whether the rest of the business can get answers from their work, or whether it's still connected to governed data.
ThoughtSpot Spreadsheets on Live Data brings the interface your team already uses and the governance your data team can't compromise on, in one place. And with Writeback, you can update the numbers and publish them to your warehouse, without ever leaving ThoughtSpot.
Request a demo to see how you can use Spreadsheets on your own data today.
