Why does Gridlines exist?

1. Why create a research repository with sources back to everything?

Research is often done in a silo. You spend a few hours pulling a bunch of reports and scouring the internet, and then you end up with a folder on your drive that makes it hard for you and others to follow your traces and logic. Where did that report exactly come from? What are the highlights?

For sourcing, we believe that using direct links (which Gridlines creates for you) leads to a more efficient and organized research process. It will take less time for you to remember where you got something from, and when others are checking your work, they'll be able to click a link and get to exactly what you were referencing.

2. Why data extraction?

People are constantly re-purposing materials and in the process they end up typing out a bunch of numbers. The issue: you're sent a PDF with a bunch of charts and tables, and now you have to re-type them all out so that you can make sense of them and add your analysis ontop of it. A lot of people use PDFs exactly for this purpose: to lock down information. But what about the people who need to actually use the data? No hope. Until now. We are working on allowing you to extract the data, and we even recreate the charts for you in Excel.