Files & Media Overview
Published February 27, 2026 · Last updated March 7, 2026 · 5 min read
Every project in Obvious has a files area where you can store, organize, and work with the documents and data your team needs. Think of it like a shared drive that's built into your workspace — except this drive has an AI agent that can actually read what's inside.
What Counts as a File
Obvious accepts most file types you'd encounter in a typical workday. The main categories:
Spreadsheets (CSV, Excel)
Drop a .csv or .xlsx file into a project, and Obvious automatically converts it into a workbook with sheets — structured, queryable, and ready to work with. If your Excel file has multiple tabs, each tab becomes its own sheet. The original file is still stored, but the real action happens in the sheet that gets created from it.
This is the fastest way to get data into Obvious. Drag in a spreadsheet, and within seconds you have a fully interactive dataset you can filter, sort, validate, and transform.
PDFs
Obvious extracts text from PDFs so the agent can read and reason about them. Upload a contract, a report, or a specification document, and the agent can answer questions about its contents, pull out key details, or summarize what's inside. Multi-page PDFs work fine — Obvious tracks page count and processes the full document.
Images
JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, and HEIF images are all supported. The agent can analyze visual content — reading text in screenshots, interpreting charts, or describing what's in a photo. Handy when someone sends you a screenshot of an error message or a photo of a whiteboard.
Documents and Text Files
Markdown files (.md) get special treatment: Obvious automatically converts them into editable documents inside your project. Other text-based files — JSON, XML, plain text — are stored as-is, and the agent can read their contents directly.
Everything Else
Word documents, PowerPoint files, and other common formats can be uploaded and stored. The agent can extract text from most Office formats. For file types that don't have built-in processing, the file is still stored and accessible — you just won't get automatic text extraction.
Where Files Live
Files belong to projects. When you upload a file, it lives inside the project you uploaded it to. Anyone with access to that project can see and download the files in it.
You'll find your files in the project sidebar alongside your other artifacts — workbooks, documents, and views. It's a flat list, not a nested folder system. If you need to organize files by topic or stage, create separate projects or use naming conventions.
How to Upload Files
Two ways to get files into a project:
Drag and drop. Grab a file from your computer and drop it anywhere in the project. Obvious handles the rest — detecting file type, running any automatic processing, and making the file available to the agent.
Through the agent. Paste a file into the chat, and the agent receives it directly. This is especially useful when you want the agent to do something with the file right away — "Here's our Q3 report, summarize the key findings" — rather than just storing it.
Files up to 1 GB are supported.
How the Agent Works with Files
This is where files in Obvious differ from files in a shared drive. The agent doesn't just store your files — it reads them.
When you upload a file, the agent can:
- Read the contents of PDFs, images, spreadsheets, and text files without you extracting anything manually
- Answer questions about what's in a document — "What's the termination clause in this contract?"
- Extract and transform data from spreadsheets into structured sheets you can query with SQL
- Analyze images using visual understanding — reading text in screenshots, interpreting charts, describing diagrams
- Compare files side by side — "How does this quarter's report differ from last quarter's?"
The agent sees files that are in its project. If you need the agent to work with a file, make sure it's uploaded to the same project where you're having the conversation.
Tip: For spreadsheets, the agent works best with the sheet that gets created from your upload — not the raw file. Once your CSV or Excel file converts to a workbook, use that workbook for analysis, filtering, and transformations.
What Happens When You Upload
The processing depends on the file type:
| File type | What Obvious does automatically |
|---|---|
| CSV, Excel (.xlsx, .xls) | Creates a workbook with sheets, one per tab. Data is structured and ready for queries. |
| Extracts text and stores page count. Full content available to the agent. | |
| JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, HEIF | Stores the image. Agent can analyze visual content and extract text. |
| Markdown (.md) | Converts to an editable document inside your project. |
| JSON, XML, plain text | Stores as-is. Agent can read the full contents. |
| Word, PowerPoint | Stores the file. Agent can extract text from the document. |
Spreadsheet processing is the most transformative — your static file becomes a live dataset. Everything else is stored and made readable to the agent, with varying levels of automatic extraction.
Next Steps
- Importing Data — Details on getting spreadsheet data into sheets
- Working with the Agent — How to ask the agent to analyze your files
- Workbooks & Sheets — What happens after your spreadsheet converts