DEVONthink lets you use several common file formats: PDF documents for reading, rich text and Markdown for writing, and many more. But if you need to record information in a spreadsheet-style format, we also have a native format for that: sheets.
A DEVONthink sheet is a file format for displaying tabular data in an accessible and editable way. If you have ever used Microsoft Excel or Apple Numbers, sheets will look familiar to you. Composed of user-definable columns and rows, it is useful for keeping records on a variety of topics, like genealogy, software licenses, customer information, bibliographic data, and more. You can find some useful example sheets in DEVONthink’s Data > New from Template menus, e.g., Education > Books.
Create a sheet via the Data > New menu. Define the columns you need by giving each a name and choosing a data type, e.g., text, date and time, URL, country, a Boolean (checkbox) option, and more. Or if you have a TSV (tab-separated values) or CSV (comma-separated values) file, you can import and use it as a sheet. Work on a sheet by clicking a cell and entering the information. Tab to the next column, or press ⏎ to create a new record or jump to the next row. You can edit the columns, add or delete rows via the Tools > Sheets commands or the buttons in the Editing bar above the view/edit pane.
When viewing a sheet, you can click the column headers to sort on that column. For Pro and Server users, you can use the View > Document Display > Form View to view each record as a form, a view familiar to FileMaker users.
One thing to be aware of: despite the similar appearance to Excel or Numbers, sheets are plain text under the hood and don’t support advanced features like formulae or conditional formatting.