Welcome to Gridlines

Gridlines is a research repository for your team. We wanted to solve two problems to make research and collaboration easier: (1) sourcing: save your sources and keep them all organized by saving direct links as you work, and (2) data extraction: we allow you to upload PDFs or images of charts, and get the underlying data.

Learn more about why we're working on these problems in Why does Gridlines exist?

Get Started by saving a source with the chrome extension

Step 1: Install the Gridlines Extension

Get the browser extension (by clicking here) -- note the extension is available on Google Chrome

Remember to pin the extension to your browser! (Click this icon in the top right of Chrome)

Step 2: Create an account

Login at https://use.gridlinesapp.com or create a new account

Step 3: Save your first source with Gridlines

Highlight text on the page. Click Control + Shift + X or "Selected Text" in the chrome extension.

Step 4: Save it to a folder

You can mark an active folder in the chrome extension, and your future text snips will automatically save to the folder. You'll end up with a folder with a bunch of places you've been and images/text that you've saved. This makes it very easy to get back to what you were reading, and to share sources with others.

Step 5: Great! Now let's try out Data Extraction

For chart extraction, please make sure to double check all of the outputs.

Snip the bar chart

Open this Meta Earnings Report PDF in your browser (link here).

We are going to demo getting the data from Advertising Revenue by Geography on Page 2

Click the Gridlines chrome extension, "Bar chart" and snip over the bar chart. The chart will open in Gridlines and start the extraction process.

Next, let's demo the other way you can open PDFs to start extracting data. You can also click "Open PDF with Gridlines" and use the Gridlines PDF Viewer. Please go to the next section below.

Note: You can also save the image or PDF and upload it directly at use.gridlinesapp.com

Gridlines PDF Viewer

Read more about the PDF Viewer here and how it allows you to extract data and create direct links

We use computer vision to automatically detect charts and tables on the page. Just go to the page you're interested in and click Detect Figures on this Page.

You'll see a green box added around the figures we support (Tables and Bar charts, at the moment. Many more coming soon).

Click and check those you are interested in, and click Export.

You can run figure detection on all of the pages but it will take a while, so it's recommended to focus on just the ones you are interested in. You can export multiple charts and tables in the PDF. We'll save them into an Excel file with each of the tabs numbered with the pages that they came from.