Frequently asked questions

A real Windows desktop app. Download ATARS-Setup.exe from the Download section, run the installer, and launch ATARS from your Start menu — it opens in its own window like Excel or Power BI and runs fully offline. This website is only where you download it. Linux and macOS versions are planned.

Yes — this is Microsoft SmartScreen’s standard notice for any new app it hasn’t seen many downloads of yet, not a virus detection. ATARS is a free student-built app and isn’t (yet) code-signed with a paid certificate, so Windows plays it safe. To install: click More info, then Run anyway. Only ever do this for the installer downloaded from this site or our official GitHub releases page.

No. ATARS is a guided, no-code platform. Cleaning, charts, statistics, machine learning, forecasting and reporting all run through clicks and menus. SQL Lab is there if you want to write queries, but you never have to.

Any structured tabular dataset from any domain — CSV, Excel, JSON, TSV, Parquet, Feather and Pickle files, or databases & warehouses: SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake and Google BigQuery. You can also drop several files and combine them by stacking rows or joining on a key.

Yes — fully. Auto-detection, all chart types, SQL, cleaning, statistics, AutoML, forecasting and exports run 100% offline. Adding your own provider key only unlocks the optional AI analyst (Aryabhata) and AI narratives on your reports.

Any OpenAI-compatible provider, plus options like Groq, xAI/Grok, Gemini, OpenRouter, Together AI, Mistral, Anthropic-compatible endpoints and local Ollama. You bring your own key — Groq and Google Gemini offer free ones.

ATARS runs entirely on your own computer — your files are processed locally and never uploaded, sold or shared. External AI calls happen only if you add a key, and go only to the provider you choose. See the Privacy Policy and Data Usage Policy.

ATARS loads full tables without silently capping rows; in-memory work is limited only by your computer's RAM. For truly huge databases, SQL Lab can push aggregation to the database itself — so even billion-row tables summarise fine.

Yes — SQL Lab lets you run full SQL (joins, window functions, CTEs and aggregations) on your dataset, powered by DuckDB. No database server to set up, and you can push a query result back into your working set.

Yes. Built-in cohort & retention analysis, RFM customer segmentation, and time-series decomposition (trend / seasonality / residual), alongside AutoML model ranking and what-if scenario simulation.

Yes. The Explainable AI module uses SHAP to show global feature importance and local, per-prediction contribution breakdowns, so you can see why a result was produced.

Polished PDF, Word (DOCX), PowerPoint (PPTX), Excel and Markdown reports, a runnable Jupyter notebook (.ipynb) that reproduces your analysis, plus CSV, JSON and chart images. With your own AI key, every export also gets an executive narrative and plain-English interpretation.

Yes — ATARS is free to download and every feature is included. No payment, no account, no trial timer. AI features are optional and use your own API key (Groq and Google Gemini offer free keys). Grab it from the Download section.

Students, researchers, analysts, educators, startups, businesses, NGOs and institutions — anyone who needs to turn data into decisions without a data-science team.