Frequently Asked Questions



Who are you?

SeekTable.com is owned and maintained by the same team that supports NReco Components (located in Kyiv, Ukraine). This is a fully bootstrapped product and it doesn't depend on investements/growth KPIs. SeekTable, established in 2017, has a time-proven track record of delivering reliable and effective BI solution. Some clients use SeekTable for many years (5+!) which speaks for itself: SeekTable is designed to be a long-term solution.

Contact us to get more info about SeekTable and the people behind it.


How safe my data on SeekTable?

Your data is used only to build visualizations and reports requested by you; see our privacy policy for more details. As any other internet service SeekTable cannot be 100% safe; if you have sensitive data it is highly recommended to use self-hosted (on-prem) SeekTable version.

Vast majority of companies use on-prem SeekTable hosted on their servers. This allows to comply with even rather restrictive data governance policies.


Is SeekTable really free?

Yes, SeekTable offers free fully-functional personal accounts (all data source connectors are available), and we don't plan to remove them in the future.

With paid subscriptions you can unlock advanced SeekTable features:

  • team sharing: ability to share cubes/reports with other SeekTable users in a secure way.
  • advanced publishing/embedding capabilities
  • special options for self-hosted SeekTable: users management / disable public signup, single sign-on, use your brand logo (white-label) / hide links to seektable.com


Share cubes/reports with other SeekTable users

It is possible to share your cubes and/or reports with your team members using team-sharing feature:

  • invite users into your team (confirmation by email is not needed on SeekTable installations)
  • share a cube (data source) or reports to team with access rules:
    • who can access the cube or report: all team members or you can choose users
    • for cube: what dimensions/measures should be accessible (all or you can choose items)
    • for report: what report options are enabled (Rows/Columns/Values/Chart/Filter selectors, Format/Params tabs, export formats)
  • record-level permissions: you can use special report parameter to filter report data by user's email

You can easily evaluate this feature with a free 14-day trial: just click on "Share to team" and then activate your trial. If you need more time to test team sharing functionality feel free to contact us.


Data preparation: transform/clean/merge

SeekTable is a data visualization/reporting tool, and it expects that data is already in the form that is suitable for that. Databases often store well-normalized data and you can use them as data sources directly (without any additional ETL); however, CSV files may contain incomplete/raw data that needs cleaning/enrichment or another tranformations. Typical case is when dataset represented by many CSV files: SeekTable needs a single CSV file and you have to combine these CSVs somehow on your side before upload.

For this purpose you can use Easy Data Transform: this is a desktop app (Win/Mac OS) where you can perform various data tranformations using GUI without need to write a code. The tool has a free 7-days trial period.


Subscribe to a report (schedule report generation)

In case of live data sources (database, or auto-refreshed CSV) you might want to automate report generation on schedule (daily, weekly etc) and get a report with newest values directly to your email inbox (or Slack/Drive/Dropbox/OneDrive etc), without the need to open SeekTable app. This is possible in one of the following ways:

  • use built-in report subscriptions: users can subscribe to reports in a self-service manner.
  • use 3rd-party automation platforms like Zapier or Microsoft Power Automate: you can create tasks that execute actions in your SeekTable account: export the report, share the report by email, upload a CSV file.
  • use SeekTable web API and automate reports generation on your side (with a shell script or a small program).

How to install SeekTable on my server?

In some cases you cannot use SeekTable as a cloud service for number of reasons - say, in the case of sensitive data that should not leave your company's intranet or your local computer (or when your DB is not accesible from the internet at all).

You still can use reporting functionality provided by a self-hosted SeekTable version which is distributed in the form of docker images. SeekTable can be installed on any Linux server that is supported by Docker (Kubernetes as well). It is possible to deploy SeekTable on your local computer too (Linux/MacOS/Windows).

If you're looking for embedded pivot tables as a component take a look to the PivotData microservice - this is a reporting engine used by SeekTable. It includes web pivot builder example that can be integrated into any web application.


Translate SeekTable to non-English languages

Cloud SeekTable UI already supports some non-English languages.

In the case of self-hosted SeekTable deployment you can customize app's UI labels or translate them to your native language or enable support of multiple languages (only languages you need). Ready-to-use translations are available here. Note that this capability requires activated white-label mode.

Technically UI localization is performed by editing of the JSON configuration (key-value pairs) in the admin area.


Can I use an API to access SeekTable reports?

Web API is available for the following actions:

  • Generate report to HTML, PDF, Excel, CSV or PNG image
  • Share report by email
  • Upload CSV data (create or refresh existing cube)

This API may be used directly (curl/scripts) or in a code-less way via Zapier/Power Automate.


Automate CSV file import from Google Drive/OneDrive/Dropbox/URL

In some cases you might want to keep reports created by CSV data in sync with:

  • Google Drive (including spreadsheets editable with Google Sheets)
  • Microsoft OneDrive (including Excel files)
  • Dropbox (only CSV/TSV files)
  • public URL (only CSV/TSV files)

This kind of automation is possible with Zapier or Microsoft Power Automate. Alternatively, you can write your own shell script and use SeekTable web API directly - say, with curl or your favorite programming language.

If you want to query data files directly (as URLs) this is possible with DuckDB/MotherDuck connector.


Is it possible to create reports with Parquet data?

Yes, Parquet files can be used as a data source via DuckDB connector:

It is very easy to query local parquet files:

SELECT * FROM 'test/*.parquet';
SELECT * FROM read_parquet(['folder1/*.parquet', 'folder2/*.parquet']);

If your Parquet data is accessible as URLs (or hosted in cloud storage like Amazon S3) it can be queried directly:

SELECT * FROM read_parquet('https://filesampleshub.com/download/code/parquet/sample1.parquet');

Connect pivot tables to Google Analytics data.

For now SeekTable doesn't have built-in connector for Google Analytics data. However, we already investigated technical possibility of this and GA connector may be implemented for live reporting with the following limitations:

  • only pivot table reports (no flat tables)
  • no totals / sub-totals for GA measures
  • max number of cells with values in the report is 10,000

If you're interested in SeekTable connector for Google Analytics please contact us.


Use database %X% as a data source. Is that possible?

If this database is SQL-compatible and it has an ODBC driver for Linux (or ADO.NET provider) we can add it to the list of supported connectors upon request. Examples of databases that may be potentially used with SeekTable:

  • Vertica
  • Exasol
  • AWS Athena
  • Apache Drill

Edit table data and write back to a database

Most BI tools are read-optimized and do not provide database writeback capability. SeekTable's primary purpose is data exploration, data visualization and reporting so it is also designed for read-only access to the data source.

However sometimes writebacks might be really useful for reports consumers:

  • Saving notes and comments directly from a report. Very often it is enough to have a text field attached to some record that can be viewed/edited by users.
  • Forecasts/projections: it is useful when expected values can be set/modified in a report.
  • Quick change records status or state
  • Code-less way to edit DB without need to develop simple CRUD app (often this is a desired option for small businesses that migrate their Excel files to database).

At this moment it is possible to have writebacks SeekTable reports only when they are embedded (via iFrame) and this requires some coding on the host app side. Technically this can be implementd via HTML formatting capabilities: generate links inside your reports that 'call' iFrame parent's function to open appropriate record form (that should be fully implemented on your side).

Alternatively, we're working on built-ion seamless writeback capability that can be configured in a no-code way to cover use-cases mentioned above. If you're interested in SeekTable's writebacks please contact us


SeekTable technology stack

SeekTable consists of two web applications:

  • Reporting engine (PivotData microservice): a NET8 app.
  • Web UI: this is an ASP.NET Core 8.0 app with SPA front-end for the main flows.

A self-hosted version is distributed as docker images published on DockerHub; all pre-requisites are already included into these images which makes initial deployment / upgrades really simple.


Which browsers does SeekTable support?

As a business app SeekTable is rather conservative in this question and supports even legacy versions of web browsers:

  • IE 9+, Edge (legacy/new)
  • Chrome (56+)
  • Firefox (52+)
  • Safari (11+)
  • Mobile versions and touch-screens are fully supported