Quickstart

This guide walks you through the core DuckViz workflow: upload a file, let the AI analyze it, build a dashboard, and generate a report.

Building an app instead?

If you're a developer who wants to embed Explorer / Dashboard / Report / Deck in your own React app, jump to the developer quickstart — npx duckviz create-app my-app scaffolds the whole thing with a demo dataset already wired up.

Create an account

Go to app.duckviz.com and sign in with Google or email. New accounts receive free credits automatically — no payment info required.

Sign-in screen showing Google and email options

Upload a file

From the Home screen, click Upload and drop a file. DuckViz supports:

CSV / TSV — comma or tab-separated
Excel — .xlsx and .xls
JSON / JSONL — objects or arrays of objects
XML — structured elements
Log files — syslog, CLF, combined, Windows Event, and custom formats

You can also drop an entire folder — DuckViz walks it recursively, skips binaries and dotfiles, and ingests each supported file into its own table.

Privacy first

Your file is parsed locally in the browser by DuckDB-WASM. Nothing is uploaded to our servers. See Privacy-First Architecture for details.

Explore the data grid

After ingestion, you land on the Explorer — a three-panel layout:

Left sidebar — file tree showing all ingested tables
Center — interactive data grid with column profiling and a SQL workspace
Right panel — AI widget recommendations (once generated)

Click any column header in the grid to see data types, null counts, and value distributions.

Explorer three-panel layout with data grid visible

Generate AI widgets

The AI widget pipeline runs automatically once the table is ready:

Classifies your data domain (e.g. "Sales", "Network Logs", "Web Traffic")
Picks chart types from 80+ available based on your actual column shapes
Generates a SQL query per chart and renders it

Charts stream in one by one in the right panel. Click the + button on any chart to add it to your dashboard.

AI widget cards streaming into the right panel with chart previews

Build a dashboard

Open the Dashboard view from the sidebar. Your added widgets appear in a 12-column draggable grid. You can:

Drag widgets to rearrange them
Resize from the bottom-right corner
Add more by returning to the Explorer and clicking +

Layouts are saved automatically per dashboard.

Dashboard view with several widgets arranged in the grid

Generate a report

Click Generate Report on the dashboard. DuckViz:

Auto-selects a template based on your data domains
Builds an instant scaffold with headings and chart blocks (no AI call)
Streams executive-summary content section by section (~1-2s each)
Fills in {{variable}} placeholders with live values from your data

Edit any block in place, use the / slash menu to insert new blocks, or ask the AI chat panel to modify sections. Export as PDF, DOCX, or PPTX.

Generated report with editor on the left and AI chat panel on the right

Next steps

Core Concepts — understand the architecture in more depth.
Product Guide — detailed docs for every feature.
CLI — push files from your terminal instead of using the upload UI.
Developer quickstart — npx duckviz create-app if you want to embed DuckViz in your own React app.