Business Launch Guide

How to Use this Guide

This guide is for admins and team leaders with Business subscriptions. It covers best practices for implementing Row Zero and the necessary actions to configure your account, connect your data, and launch with your team.

Overview: What is Row Zero?

Row Zero is a modern spreadsheet. It’s fast, secure, and connects directly to your data. Unlike conventional spreadsheets, Row Zero runs in the cloud instead of on employee laptops. This has two advantages:

Compute can be scaled up to handle large data sets.
Sensitive data is trapped securely in the cloud.

Row Zero combines the scale of a data platform with the flexibility of a spreadsheet, giving teams the familiar interface they want to access massive, live datasets.

Key Concepts

Row Zero is structured around a few entities that define how data is organized and shared:

Connections are integrations with external databases, data warehouses, or cloud storage. They can be configured to allow querying, writeback, or both. Connections handle authentication and permissions.

Workbooks are spreadsheets that contain data, formulas, and/or visualizations. All workbooks are private when created, but can be shared according to your organization’s policies. You can import data from connections into your workbooks by directly querying connections or inserting data from a data source.

Data Sources are published queries that can be shared with other Row Zero users. They are used to manage governed “source of truth” datasets or to give less technical users direct access to live data without writing SQL.

Set Up Your Account

User Provisioning

Row Zero uses just-in-time account provisioning for Business accounts. There is no need for admins to create accounts for new users. Users are automatically added to your account when they sign up, assuming they are using an email domain (e.g. name@company.com) associated with your account.

Row Zero has two user roles:

Users: This is the default role in Row Zero. Users can create workbooks and data sources, and can also collaborate with others, within the bounds of a workspace’s sharing policies.
Admins: Admins have additional privileges, including managing membership.

Action: Contact support@rowzero.io to assign your Admin(s). If your organization has multiple email domains, contact support@rowzero.io to add secondary domains.

Row Zero is built with security concerns in mind. Business workspaces use Row Zero’s default security policies, which are designed to balance security needs with business needs, and are appropriate for most security-conscious organizations. Admins can view these settings in the Workspace Settings page in Row Zero. If you need to customize security settings, consider upgrading to an Enterprise plan.

In addition, you can configure region lock to satisfy data residency requirements.

Action: If needed, contact support@rowzero.io to configure region lock.

Connect Your Data and Publish Data Sources

Connections

Connections make it easy to import and analyze big datasets, automate updates, and write back to your data warehouse. Row Zero supports connections for all major data warehouses.

Links to integration documentation:

Action: To get immediate value out of Row Zero, configure your connection(s) and share them with users who will need to run queries from Row Zero.

Data Sources

Data sources are reusable, published queries. They’re the foundation of governed, self-service access to data, enabling you to expose live datasets to users without writing SQL or copying results between tools. If you publish an update to a data source, any workbook using that data source will automatically update, ensuring everyone works from the same source of truth.

To balance flexibility with control, design your data sources around two types of use cases:

Core entities (unaggregated data): Create a data source for each foundational table or entity — for example, “Orders,” “Customers,” or “Contracts.” These give non-technical users direct, governed access to granular data. Users can then join, filter, and summarize that data using standard spreadsheet operations. For very large datasets, add query filters (e.g., date range or key variables) to keep results performant.
Common queries or reports. Build data sources for frequently used metrics or business reports. This establishes a consistent, auditable “source of truth” and eliminates duplicated SQL or manual extracts.

Action: Configure your first data sources.

Create a list of your core entities and common reports. Identify the users who will need access to them.
Start with 3-5 data sources for core entities, and add more as adoption grows. Creating and modifying data sources is simple, so it's easy to modify your approach over time.
Share your data sources with users.

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