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AI Tools — extend, fill, transform, OCR, rewrite

AI Tools — extend, fill, transform, OCR, rewrite

Free's AI Generate creates a table from a prompt. Pro adds a panel of six surgical AI tools you use against an existing table.

Where to find AI Tools

Open any MMTable in the editor. A sparkle-icon button labelled AI Tools appears in the toolbar, next to AI Generate. Click it to open the panel.

Right-clicking any cell also shows an AI: Rewrite this cell option. This is the shortcut to the sixth tool below.

Extend rows

Looks at your existing table, then generates N more rows in the same pattern.

Example: you have 5 rows of SaaS companies with name, founder, year, funding. Click Extend rows → 10 more. The AI returns 10 additional companies that fit the same schema.

Use the optional Guidance field to steer the generation — "European companies only" or "B2C only" or "alphabetical by name after the existing ones".

Add column

Adds one new column with an AI-computed value per existing row.

Example: you have a table of programming languages with name and year. Click Add column, name it "Designed by", give an instruction like "primary author or designer of the language". The AI fills the new column row by row.

The model gets the full table as context, so values in the new column can reference other columns in the same row.

Fill column

Fills blank cells in an existing column without touching cells that already have values.

Useful when you've populated most of a column manually but a few rows are missing values. Pick the column, optionally describe what should go there, click Fill. Existing values are preserved.

Transform column

Applies an instruction to every cell in a column. Examples:

  • "Translate to French"
  • "Convert to title case"
  • "Round to the nearest hundred"
  • "Reformat dates as YYYY-MM-DD"
  • "Replace company names with their stock tickers"

The AI applies the same instruction to each cell, so transformations that depend on context (e.g. "use the value in column B") work because the AI sees each row.

Image-to-table (OCR)

Upload a screenshot or photo of a table — printed reference table, screen capture of a chart, photo of a spreadsheet — and the AI extracts the values into your editor.

  1. Click Image-to-table.
  2. Choose a PNG, JPG, WebP, or GIF file. 5 MB cap.
  3. The image goes directly to Anthropic's vision API — it's never written to your server's uploads/ folder, never publicly URL'd, never persists.
  4. The returned table fills the editor.

Tips: high-contrast images work best. Photos of paper tables work as long as the text is legible. If the table has merged cells or footnotes, expect to clean up after the OCR.

Rewrite cell

Right-click any cell → AI: Rewrite this cell. A small dialog asks for an instruction. The AI replaces that single cell's content.

Useful for one-off edits — "make this more concise", "translate to Spanish", "rephrase as a question" — without retyping.

Cost considerations

Every AI Tools call hits Anthropic's API and is billed to your account. Per-call cost is typically a fraction of a cent, but:

  • "Extend rows" generates N rows in one call — bigger N, larger response, slightly higher cost.
  • "Transform column" runs once per column, not per cell — the whole column is sent and a transformed column comes back.
  • Image-to-table is the most expensive — vision input is priced higher than text.

If you have a multi-user site, consider adding a per-user rate limit if you're concerned about runaway costs. There's no rate limit built in yet.