Most data work still happens in spreadsheets full of formulas, or in scripts written by the one person on the team who codes. Both work — until you need to check a number, change a step, or hand the job to someone else.
The problem is that both hide the process. A script is a list of instructions; a spreadsheet only shows the final result. But when you're turning a stack of PDFs into a report, what you really care about is the data itself — what it looks like after each step, and whether it's right.
That's why Altera is built around a data flow. Each node does one job — extract, clean, filter, combine, summarize — and you can open any node to see its output. The workflow is the process, laid out where everyone can see it.
This is a live canvas, just like in the app: drag the nodes around, or zoom with the controls.
Three reasons we believe visual workflows are the best way to work with data:
1. You care about the result, not the code
When you summarize invoices by supplier, the questions that matter are which rows to keep, how to group them, and what to total. How that's written in code doesn't help you answer any of them.
In Altera you pick a node, set its options, and see the result right away. Every setting is a visible choice, not a line of syntax you have to debug.
2. A workflow everyone can read
A workflow is a shared language. A finance lead, an analyst, and an auditor can all look at the same canvas and follow what happens to the data, step by step, without reading a script.
That makes it easy to review someone's work, hand a process over when a colleague is away, and show exactly how a figure in a report was produced.
3. No coding degree required
You can build your first useful workflow in an afternoon: extract a table from a PDF, clean it up, and export it to Excel.
From there you learn one node at a time. The same canvas that handles a simple cleanup also handles merges, pivots, regular expressions, and multi-step reports, so you never outgrow it.
What makes Altera different
PDF extraction is part of the workflow
Most tools start once your data is already in a table. In Altera, extracting data from PDFs is a node like any other, so getting the data out and cleaning it up happen in one place.
Build once, run it again every month
Save a workflow and every setting is kept, including the areas you highlighted on the PDF. When next month's file arrives, swap it in and run the same steps again.
Your files stay on your computer
Altera is a desktop app. Your documents are processed locally on your own machine, not uploaded to someone else's server.