Axis Sheets — a spreadsheet inside your system of record

Axis Sheets is a real spreadsheet built into AxisIQ: Excel-style formulas, whole-workbook XLSX import, and an AXLOOKUP function that reads your live business records into a cell — under the same permissions as everything else.

Axis Sheets is a real spreadsheet — tabs, A1 references, a formula bar — that lives inside AxisIQ instead of in a downloads folder. It is the grid where thinking happens, sitting next to the records your business runs on, under the same permissions, with one formula no standalone spreadsheet can have: AXLOOKUP, which reads your live business data into a cell.

The case against running a business on spreadsheets is made elsewhere on this site, and every word of it still stands. But the grid remains the best thinking tool ever shipped: pricing a quote, stress-testing a margin, planning next quarter's purchases. Until now that thinking happened in a file — exported, emailed around, stale by Thursday. Now it happens beside the data it is thinking about.

An actual spreadsheet, not a table with ambitions

Open a workbook and it takes over the screen, the way a spreadsheet should. Arrow keys move the selection, ranges drag out, shift-click extends, ctrl-click adds a second range. Ctrl-C copies a range that pastes cleanly into Excel; pasting a block from Excel fills the grid the same way. There is a formula bar with function autocomplete, and point mode: click cells while typing a formula and the references insert themselves at the caret, exactly as your hands expect.

Tabs run along the bottom. Columns are typed — text, number, currency, date, checkbox, select — so a date column holds dates and a currency column holds money, which is more than most production spreadsheets can claim.

Formulas you already know

The grammar is Excel's. =SUM(B2:B40), absolute refs like $A$1, whole-column ranges like A:A, cross-tab references like 'Costs'!B2. Around forty-five functions are built in — SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, IF, IFERROR, VLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, COUNTIF, SUMIF, and the usual text and date family.

Errors are values, never silence: #DIV/0!, #VALUE!, #N/A, and #CYCLE! when formulas chase each other in a circle. Insert or delete a row and every formula that pointed at moved cells is rewritten to follow them; a formula that pointed into a deleted row shows #REF! instead of quietly reading the wrong data — which is the failure mode that makes ordinary spreadsheets dangerous.

AXLOOKUP — the formula a standalone spreadsheet cannot have

=AXLOOKUP("customers", "email", A2, "credit_limit")

That cell now holds the credit limit of the customer whose email is in A2 — read from the live record, not from a copy somebody exported last month. Build a quote against today's price list, check a payment plan against today's outstanding balance, without an export step existing at all.

Two properties matter here. It runs under your permissions: a field you are not allowed to read comes back empty in the sheet too, because the sheet asks as you, not as some system account. And it is read-only: a sheet can read records, never change them. Changes to business data go through records, where validation and the audit trail live.

Your Excel files come in whole

Import an .xlsx and the workbook arrives as a workbook — every tab, with formulas the engine understands staying live formulas, and anything it cannot evaluate keeping the value Excel last computed, so nothing reads as blank. Export goes the other way: a real .xlsx with values and formula sources, which Excel recomputes on open. CSV works per tab in both directions.

Fast because it is served from memory

Each tab's grid is held in RAM by AxisDB — the same database engine that runs the rest of the platform — while you work. Opening a workbook warms it, workbooks idle for a while are released automatically, and every write is durable on disk the moment it lands: memory is the serving tier, not the storage.

One editor at a time, and honest about it

The first person to type gets the pen. Everyone else sees the sheet live, with a read-only badge, until the writer is done. That is not real-time co-editing — no ghost cursors, no simultaneous typing — and we would rather say so plainly than let two people believe their edits both landed.

Permissions like everything else

Who can open a workbook, who can edit it and who can manage it are set per workbook, in the same permissions model that governs every record and report — not a per-file share dialog that nobody audits. API keys can read and write sheets programmatically under the same rules.

The honest limits

A workbook holds up to 20 tabs of 200 columns each. Rows per tab depend on plan: 5,000 on Free, 50,000 on Growth, 100,000 on Business; the free tier also carries a modest in-memory allowance, and a workbook that will not fit tells you so instead of degrading.

There is no cell formatting, no conditional formatting, no charts, no pivot tables, no frozen panes, and a column's type is fixed once created. If the workbook is the deliverable — a formatted board pack, a chart-heavy model — Excel is still the better tool, and the XLSX export exists precisely so you can finish there. And money truth does not live in any spreadsheet: formula arithmetic here is ordinary floating point, good for planning and analysis, while amounts the business answers for belong in the ledger, which does exact arithmetic and cannot be quietly edited.

How it fits with the rest

Operations holds the records; Sheets is the thinking surface beside them. Analytics answers questions about data as it is — a sheet is for changing the numbers by hand and watching what happens. When a sheet grows up into a process the business depends on, the migration path is a CSV import away.

FAQ

Can I import my existing Excel files? Yes. XLSX import brings in the whole workbook, and formulas the engine supports stay live formulas rather than frozen values. Anything it cannot evaluate keeps the value Excel last computed. CSV import per tab works too.

Can two people edit the same sheet at once? No. One person holds the edit lease at a time; everyone else reads the live sheet with a read-only badge. Real-time co-editing is not built yet, and the lease is how we avoid pretending otherwise.

Can a sheet read my business records? Yes — that is AXLOOKUP. It reads live record values under the permissions of the person recalculating, so it can never show you a field you could not open directly. One thing to know: the value it fetches is stored in the workbook, so anyone who can read the workbook sees it. Share workbooks accordingly.

Can a sheet change my records? No. Lookups are read-only, deliberately. Record changes go through the records themselves, where field rules are enforced and the audit trail is written.

Does it do charts, pivots or cell formatting? Not yet — none of the three. For charts over live business data, use Analytics; for a formatted deliverable, export to XLSX and finish in Excel.

How big can a sheet get? 20 tabs per workbook, 200 columns per tab, and rows per tab by plan: 5,000 on Free, 50,000 on Growth, 100,000 on Business.