From a web page to a chart you can trust

A number you cannot check is just a rumour

Every research task ends in the same place: a figure sitting on a page, and no clean way to get it into a form you can work with. You retype it into a spreadsheet, lose the source somewhere in the process, and three weeks later cannot remember whether it was a total or an average.

The gap worth closing is not “find the number”. It is everything between finding it and trusting it — and that stretch is where research quietly goes wrong.

Step one: take the table, not a picture of it

Ask for the table on the page in front of you and it comes off as data — rows, columns, types — rather than as an image or a paraphrase in prose. The source URL travels with it, so the figure can be traced back to where it was published without anybody having to remember.

This counts for more on the pages that are hard to reach than the ones that are easy. A statistics portal that paginates its results, a catalogue hidden behind three filter dropdowns, an archive whose own search box is the only way in — the assistant works those controls for you, so you arrive at the table instead of clicking towards it for twenty minutes.

Step two: reshape it where reshaping is safe

Real tables arrive wrong. Numbers stored as text. A header row repeated every twenty lines. One column holding two facts. Four files that should have been one. Cleaning that up by hand is exactly where the mistakes get in, because every fix is a small opportunity to fix it slightly incorrectly.

The transformations run in a sandboxed Python environment: filtering, grouping, joining, pivoting, deriving new columns, folding several sources into one table. It is isolated, it touches only your material, and it exists for the length of a single request.

Why a sandbox rather than prose

A language model asked to add up two thousand numbers will produce something that looks exactly like a total. Running the sum in Python produces a total. The difference is invisible in the output and decisive in the meeting where somebody checks it.

Step three: see it

Ask for the chart you actually want — a trend over time, a comparison across categories, a distribution — and it comes back rendered from your figures, with the axes labelled. Ask for a different cut and it redraws, rather than starting the analysis over from the beginning.

Step four: hand it over

When the work has to leave your desk, the same material becomes a styled Excel workbook you can keep working in, a full report, or a slide deck. These are versioned: asking for a change edits the file rather than regenerating it from nothing, so the fifth revision still carries the first revision’s corrections.

Keeping the trail

Every source page you used stays attached to the project with its link, so the citation is written before you need it. When a figure is challenged a month later, the path from the chart back to the published page is still intact — which is the difference between defending a number and re-doing the work.

Four steps, one panel, and the sources still attached at the end of it.