Key Concepts
The building blocks of Normain, from a single question to a finished report.
Normain takes the documents you already work with and turns them into clear, trustworthy insights, each one traceable to its exact source. A few simple building blocks make this possible, and they fit neatly inside one another. This chapter introduces each one in turn.
Projects: where all your work lives
A project is where all your work lives. Most teams create a project for each client delivery, or one for each kind of analysis they run regularly. Creating a project opens up your first Extraction, which is essentially a single type of analysis. From there, you upload files, ask questions, and validate the results. Read more about how to start your first project in Creating a project.
Extractions: a single analysis of your documents
An Extraction is a single analysis, and it is where the core work happens. In an Extraction, you add your documents, ask your questions, and get back fully sourced answers, called Insights, along with the tools to validate them and work on them with your team. An Extraction can be a simple analysis of a few documents, or it can scale to the same questions asked across hundreds of documents at once, or a structured grid you lay out yourself, column by column. There are different types of Extraction for different kinds of analysis, and the type you pick shapes how you set it up. You can read more about the different types in Creating a project.
Notebooks: build your method as a series of steps
A Notebook is a project you build as a series of steps. Each step holds a plain-language instruction, the way you would brief a colleague, together with the files it works on. Normain performs each step across your documents and shows where every answer came from. Later steps build on earlier ones, and the final step can produce a finished deliverable.
This is the main way to take a whole piece of work into Normain, from the first document to the final report, and run it end to end. Write the method once, and the whole team can run the same steps on their own files, so the approach stays consistent whoever picks up the work. Read more in Notebooks.
Deliverables: the finished document your work produces
A deliverable is the finished document produced as the final step of your Notebook, such as an audit report, a compliance gap assessment or an M&A due diligence summary. It can be built either from a blank page or produced directly into the template used by your firm. It can take any format including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, web pages and more.
If you already have a working document, Normain can leave suggested edits and comments directly in it, which you can approve or reject, so you always stay in control. Read more in Deliverables.
Workflows: several analyses chained into steps
A Workflow is the earlier way to chain several analyses into a fixed sequence of steps that ends in a finished document. Notebooks now do the same work with far more flexibility, so new work is best built as a Notebook, while Workflows stay fully supported for teams already using them.
Chat: build a project by describing it
Unsure where to start? Instead of building your project yourself, you can let the Normain chat set it up for you. Tell the chat what you want to analyse and which documents you have, and it builds the project in whatever shape fits the work best, live in front of you. You can step in at any point and edit anything as it goes. Read more in Using the chat.
Trust Panel: check and verify any answer
The Trust Panel is how you validate and iterate on any Insight. Open it to see:
- Overview - a quick read on the answer, together with Normain’s assessment of how reliable it thinks the answer is
- Source references - the citation behind every answer, down to the page and exact passage
- Thinking steps - the full chain of steps Normain worked through to reach the answer
- Collaboration - tools to validate and work through answers and collaborate with your team
- History - every earlier version of the answer, easy to compare across runs and restore at any point
This is just the start of what the Trust Panel can do. To uncover its full power, read more in Validating your results.
Templates: a saved project setup you reuse
Once a project reliably gives you the answers you need, you can save it as a template. The next time similar work comes in, you start from the template instead of building everything again. The structure, questions, and steps are already there, and you simply swap in the new documents. Templates can also be shared across your team, so everyone works from the same setup. Read more in Templates and Publications.
Putting it together
That is the whole toolkit: projects to hold the work, Extractions or Notebooks to build it, deliverables to hand it over, and a Trust Panel so you never have to take Normain at its word. Now go make your best work repeatable.