Quickstart¶
XLTable Desktop turns your warehouse tables into Excel PivotTables — and lets an AI assistant answer questions from the same cubes. It is free, runs entirely on your Windows machine, and requires no license, no server to deploy and no administrator rights; no data leaves your network.
This guide takes you to the first run; from there the product itself walks you through the rest. For a multi-user server installation on Linux or Windows Server, see Installation.
What you need first¶
Access to your data warehouse — host, user and password, the same credentials you use in DBeaver or DataGrip. ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, Trino, StarRocks, Greenplum, Databricks and DuckDB are supported.
Microsoft Excel — Microsoft 365 or Excel 2016+.
Windows 10 or 11.
Install¶
Download XLTable-<version>-setup.exe from https://xltable.com/download
and run it — a Next-Finish wizard installs XLTable into your user profile. Administrator rights are not
required and no UAC elevation prompt appears.
Note
The installer is digitally signed by BR Systems LLP. Windows may still show a “Windows protected your PC” (SmartScreen) dialog on the first run of a freshly downloaded installer while a new release builds up its download reputation — this is not a virus alert. Check that Publisher names BR Systems LLP (click the small More info link if the line is not shown), then Run anyway. Details: Windows 10 / 11.
Prefer a portable copy without an installer? Use the zip archive instead — see Portable zip.
First run¶
Start XLTable from the Start menu (XLTable Desktop). A console window opens — that window is the server: keep it open while you work, closing it stops the server.
The browser then opens the admin console on the Quick start page
(http://127.0.0.1:5000/admin) — a checklist of four steps: connect
your warehouse, create your first cube from any table, connect Excel,
connect an AI assistant. From here, just follow the checklist in the
browser: each step leads to the page where it is completed, and the
statuses update as you go. The first PivotTable usually takes about ten
minutes.
Every detail of the first launch — what each step does, repeated launches, what happens when the port is taken — is described in Quick start page and first launch (XLTable Desktop).
Next steps¶
MCP server — connect an AI assistant to your cubes: Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Copilot in VS Code, a local model, or any other MCP client
OLAP cube definition — the cube definition format: measures, dimensions, hierarchies, and refining a generated cube by hand
Upgrading from XLTable Desktop — when a second person needs your cubes: upgrading to the server edition (the cube files work there unchanged)
Support — troubleshooting and contact information