Exactly what Grid by Zaweba sends to an AI, and when
Grid by Zaweba sends data to your own AI account only when you ask, and only a limited set: the selection, nearby formulas and headers. Keys stay encrypted.
Spreadsheets hold some of the most private information people keep: household finances, salaries, customer lists, exam results. Before using AI on a sheet, it's fair to want to know precisely what leaves your PC. Grid by Zaweba answers that plainly, and lets you check it every time.
Only when you ask
The first rule is simple. Grid sends nothing to an AI provider until you ask a question or run an AI action. It doesn't scan your workbook in the background, it doesn't send anything when you open a file, and the AI actions are greyed out entirely until you've connected an account of your own. There's no Zaweba AI service in between; the request goes to the provider you chose.
What goes with a request
When you do ask, Grid sends a limited, defined set of context, enough for the model to give a useful answer about your sheet:
The sheet's name. The address and size of the selection. The active cell, with its formula if it has one and the values that formula refers to. The header row, so the model knows what the columns mean. The selected cells themselves, as text, up to 200 rows by 30 columns. And up to 40 formulas, so the model can see how the sheet is built.
That's it. Other sheets and the rest of the workbook stay where they are. And the selection limit means that even if you select a whole huge sheet, at most 200 rows by 30 columns of it go.
Seeing it for yourself
The Ask AI panel has a Context sent view, which shows what was included with each request. You don't have to take the description above on trust: look at the view after a question and you'll see the context that went. It's also a useful way to learn how much the selection matters.
Keeping requests small
The single best privacy habit is to select only what the question needs. To fix one formula, select that cell rather than the whole sheet. To clean a column of names, select that column, not the neighbouring salaries. Smaller selections also tend to give better answers, because the model isn't distracted by irrelevant data.
For sensitive work, consider a model that runs on your own PC, such as through Ollama. Grid supports free local models, and with one of those, nothing leaves your machine at all.
Your keys
An AI account usually comes with a key, a long code that lets Grid use the account on your behalf. Grid encrypts keys for your Windows account and keeps them in the shared AI store, so other Windows users on the same PC can't read them. On a Mac or Linux PC, Grid uses Keychain or the secret-service store instead.
Trusting the provider
Once a request reaches your chosen provider, their own terms apply to it. That's a reason to pick a provider whose approach to data you're comfortable with, and another reason a local model is attractive for confidential sheets.
The rest of Grid by Zaweba never needs a network connection. Functions, charts, pivot tables, printing and PDF all work offline, so the AI is the only part that talks to anything outside your PC, and only when you ask it to.
