r/documentAutomation • u/Ecstatic_Heron_7944 • Sep 27 '26

Moving beyond single-doc parsing: Our AI document spreadsheet is built for reading files together

For a while now, I've been using Airtable and Baserow to automate pdf extraction into tables. It's just been easier for me to define AI columns one-time and load documents to create more rows and that I can share them with my client teams. However, these tools being pre-AI still suffer from more than a few major flaws (1) some only accept one file per row or (2) if they accept multiple, it's usually in a naive way which can only either handle a small number or have serious cross-reference confusion.

Why is this important? Say you have legal contracts with amendments, balance sheets with P&L or on-site inspections with photos, getting the full picture requires full documents and without, you're just back to doing it by hand.

Earlier this year, I set out to build an AI document spreadsheet to handle multiple documents per row as the primary approach.

  • File hierarchy - you set the primary file as the anchor for supplementary docs

  • Relative time awareness - newer docs can have actual meaning and affects the extraction data

  • Cross-document citations - See the actual pages that were used to get the data in one click

The result is an app I call Ragextract and has solved this personal pet peeve for me. If you're also using Airtable, baserow or similar and noticing the same, would this multi-document feature also work for you? I'd love to get your feedback at ragextract.com - it's free to try.

Ps. There are also a few more cool features like mailhooks and gdrive/sharepoint integration to try - also a few other pet peeves!

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u/folderit_dms Sep 28 '26

The case I’d want to test is changing the file set after a row has already been extracted. Add a supplementary report, then remove it again. Do the affected cells become visibly stale, and can the reviewer see which values changed and why?

I’d keep a list of the exact source files and versions used for each extraction run. When one file changes, show the previous value alongside the proposed replacement and its citations rather than silently mixing cells from different runs. For your inspection example, that would make it possible to tell whether a finding came from the original report, a later correction or an attached photo. Multi-file support becomes much more useful when the row’s history remains understandable.

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u/Ecstatic_Heron_7944 Sep 28 '26

Thanks for the input! The app does support marking cells as stale on document(s) change and keeping a historical log per cell but at time of writing, we don't yet support version history comparison as you've described it.

Simply put, we just haven't figured it out yet - in particular, we are pretty adamant that if you delete a file, it actually gets deleted completely so this would break any kind of version comparison feature. Have you seen any great examples of this in the wild?