Automatic In-Place Spreadsheet Filling

Before I get to the feature, I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Brett Thomas, Wolfia's new CTO. I have over 25 years of experience in leading technology teams, including being EVP of Engineering at EMusic.com back in the dot-com days; being CTO and CSO of Vindicia, a SaaS company that handles other companies' credit card payments; and Director of Platform Engineering at OneSignal. I've been playing with LLMs in my spare time over the past eighteen months and it's been really exciting to be developing a useful product with these AI agents.

Enough about me, though -- I'm here to talk about the first big feature that I've been working on. Our users know that Wolfia automates the tedious task of filling out security questionnaires. Using AI, we combine information from your policies, previously filled out questionnaires, and individual answers that you give us. From these, we figure out the answers to the questions, and provide you with supporting links to the documents we got them from so that you can be confident the answers are correct.

However, since our launch, the process of actually filling out the spreadsheets had still fallen to users. We've provided you with a simple spreadsheet of "questions" and "answers," but it's not the one your vendor gave you that they're expecting back. So you still had to copy and paste those answers into the old spreadsheet.

Now, with our latest release, this just happens automatically -- you can download the spreadsheet in its original form, with all the answers in the right place!

As someone who in my previous roles has spent countless hours filling these things out, I have to admit it really felt magical the first time I uploaded a test spreadsheet and...it just was filled out with no human intervention!

For our customers that have been using our product for a while, you may have noticed that we have a tendency to think headings -- things like "Overview" in the sample image above -- are questions, and try to answer them. This release should also make our AI agent much smarter about headings and extraneous things like instructions or explanations of what the document is, and not mistake them for questions.

Since we're all about transparency here at Wolfia, I do want to note some limitations. Right this second, it does not work on a spreadsheet with multiple tab^{See update below!}. I'm working on that right now and we expect to add support for that imminently, but this was so cool I decided not to let perfection hold it up. The other limitation is that it needs to be on the simpler end of spreadsheets -- think a list of questions in one column and an answer spot next to them. We can't yet handle complex sheets with lots of drop-down selections and what-not, though I'll be working on that as well in the near future. And of course if the new feature doesn't fill your sheet out perfectly, we still have the original Autofill Questionnaires web interface available, as well as downloading a simple "question and answer" spreadsheet as you always have.

Please also note for existing customers that any spreadsheets originally uploaded prior to June 27, 2024 will not fill in place, as we store some data at uploadd that is needed for the in-place filling, and the code to do that was not published until that time.

As I said, I'm very excited to be working on our products and helping eliminate the drudgery from these common compliance and sales tasks. We'd always love to hear from our existing customers how the new feature is working. If you're not a new customer but are tired of filling out security questionnaires by hand, I'd encourage you to schedule a demo and let us show you what we can do for you!

The above limitation of only working with single-tab spreadsheets has been resolved and we will now correctly fill out answers on their correct tabs!