23 ms·

Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans

96 points by matthewgapp 2mo ago

MiroslavPokorny 2mo ago
From what ive seen and some guessing, im thinking you are trying to make Excel a platform, where a Platform means something that is programmable rather than just an App that a user can click or type text in. What platform ideas will you bring in addition to what you have done. Im asking because I am also creating a spreadsheet platform, where everything (lots) of features are programmable rather than users being forced to use what the UI provides.
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  Yeah we think there is an opportunity to really open up the xlsx runtime. There are a lot of smart people in the world - and we're excited for them to build on top.
Alfie_667 2mo ago
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matthewgapp 2mo ago
Hey HN, I’m Matt, the founder of Nobie. I started my career in banking and haven’t been able to shake the deep reverence I have for Excel. I grew up on it. There are many good attempts to reinvent spreadsheets. We’re doing something different. We don’t want people to adopt a new language or move their work to another format. Instead, we want to improve how the Excel language is run and give people a choice of where to run it. That’s what we’re building with Nobie: a second Excel-compatible runtime. It’s available as a native Mac app and as a CLI for macOS and Linux. The engine is written from first principles in Rust. Nobie isn’t done. We are not at Excel parity today. Some features are missing. We’re a team of four systems engineers. For the next eight weeks, all our work is going into closing those gaps. Nobie is free and always will be for everything you can do in Excel. Try it with a real workbook and tell us what breaks. The complicated and ugly ones are especially welcome.
- moostii 2mo ago
  What is the business model here? The website made think "sounds too good to be true"
  - njaremko 2mo ago
    That was our goal :P https://nobie.com/desktop-app-license-terms https://nobie.com/desktop-app-license-terms
  - matthewgapp 2mo ago
    Fair question. The short version is: the desktop app and CLI are free and always will be; optional cloud & AI services will cost money. Working w/ .xlsx files shouldn't cost money, and we think people should be able to use their own AI. We expect to charge orgs/enterprises for a cloud product around governance, and for AI where/when it makes sense. We also plan to make some money when large companies use Nobie for training or to power their products. Right now, though, we’re entirely focused on making the desktop app and CLI hands down the best xlsx experience in the world. The paid cloud product comes later.
    - matthewgapp 2mo ago
      Also, we've designed the product so it costs us zero dollars to run :) having zero marginal cost is nice and allows us to do things that others can't
      - htrp 2mo ago
        Is this because your free customers bring their own ai/tokens?
        njaremko 2mo ago
        Yeah, we're not providing subsidized AI to people. It costs us nothing to give people a great, computer-use friendly, native spreadsheet app
njaremko 2mo ago
I'm one of the engineers on the team. We're really excited to be putting this out into the world. There's a massive amount of functionality in this thing that we're hoping will make the lives of everyone who needs to work with xlsx files better. Both programmatically and with a GUI. See https://nobie.com/cli https://nobie.com/cli for the dev focused aspects, but I'm really proud of this thing, and happy that most people will be able to use it for free. Happy to answer any questions people have.
SirFatty 2mo ago
Maybe the title should mention MacOS not "agents and humans"?
- njaremko 2mo ago
  CLI works on linux too. Windows CLI will be out this week. The GUI already runs on linux, but we didn't want to muddy the launch page today. It will likely be out this week.
njaremko 2mo ago
Some features I think are pretty cool: - We can render pixel perfect PNGs and PDFs (native vectorized PDFs) - You can pass an xlsx, inputs, and output cells, and get a JSON API from any excel workbook - You can pipe a postgres query into an xlsx file, and then run excel formulas over it - You can pretty easily setup a `git diff` helper for xlsx files that shows you the changes you care about - We have a built-in terminal, auto-launchers for Claude and Codex (with some fancy hooks that inject context when you send messages) and a pretty good MCP. After you install Nobie you're agents can do pretty much anything in an xlsx. We also provide a lot of tools that give agents high-signal information about the workbook, so they can quickly get up to speed and do good work - You can programmatically edit workbooks in pleasant ways, and the workbook will update properly, AND recalc incrementally, AND the numbers will tie with Excel (if they don't definitely let us know, but we've put a huge amount of work into making sure they do) - There's a bunch of examples on the CLI page on the website, but a lot of previously impossible/very hard things are now pretty trivial with our CLI, and I think this'll be really useful for for a lot of devs (the CLI will be getting better throughout this week, I have a lot more stuff I want to do with this) - Happy to talk technical details. Everything is from scratch, and our render and calc engines have been a massive amount of work.
- MiroslavPokorny 2mo ago
  Do you plan to make other features within the spreadsheet "programmable", like allowing the user to "enter a script" to do the formatting of a cell etc ? Im asking because my own spreadsheet efforts are also trying to make the spreadsheet a platform. A lot has been done but there are a few cool features that are nearly there. Everything is on github (look up my name).
  - matthewgapp 2mo ago
    we have a CLI and we'll launch SDKs. Every aspect of Nobie will be scriptable. Love that your head is in the same place.
- petilon 2mo ago
  Can I use CLI to convert an .xlsx to PDF? What sort of pagination do you support? Can the page expand to contain the entire sheet? Can you split into physical pages given page size?
ckrapu 2mo ago
Very cool. Excited to try this out sometime!
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  let us know your thoughts. we're shipping updates every day
Sorvad 2mo ago
Would love a good, modern Excel alternative. A few feature requests: - Ability to set european number style as standard - Ability to import/open csv
- njaremko 2mo ago
  - We had a bet internally about how long it'd take for someone to complain about default number styles, we'll get this in by tomorrow - CSV import can be done today either by using claude / codex and telling them to load the CSV into nobie (we install an MCP on first boot of the app, and we have a really nice built-in terminal, you can click the claude / codex buttons in the top button bar to launch them), or using the CLI. We're working on a GUI workflow for it, but CSV is a cursed format, so we want to do it better than Excel
  - njaremko 2mo ago
    This slipped a day because I want to make sure I'm handling all the edge cases with locales properly. Sorry about that.
hmokiguess 2mo ago
Tangential, but what's the art style of those images throughout the page? I really like them.
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  glad you like em :) we're going for a gritty, off-world museum vibes. Generated with midjourney.
  - tomelliot 2mo ago
    can you share your prompt? i love the combination of digital + offworld vibes with the brushstrokes, i'd love to iterate on it. also, such a smart idea to build the excel runtime alternative. remember us when you get snapped up by a lab for a training environment.
HPsquared 2mo ago
Can it handle dynamic array formulas and LET, LAMBDA etc?
- njaremko 2mo ago
  Yep :) We fully support the formula language, and workbook semantics. The main deficiency we have right now is not letting people create / edit pivot tables. We support what-if scenario analysis, conditional formatting, cycles, lambdas, arrays, spills, lets, etc.
  - nhatcher 2mo ago
    That is really cool and impressive! Fantastic job
  - dmitry-vsl 2mo ago
    Did you implement formulas from scratch, or used a third-party lib?
    - njaremko 2mo ago
      Everything's from scratch, we've been working on this for a long time :)
gervwyk 2mo ago
Very nice! Keen to try this out, been avoiding to add any MS to my new mac, and bumping into office files a few times a week sucks.
- njaremko 2mo ago
  I hope you try Nobie out. We've put a lot of effort into making sure its a great experience. We're a native app, so you should expect a reasonable app size, 120fps, fast (correct) calcs, all the keyboard shortcuts from Excel, and a pretty UI. If you're an LLM person, we ship a pretty good MCP, so you can just tell claude/codex to work on the file, and it'll open nobie and update it in front of you (if you use our embedded terminal, you get fancy hooks and context injection from the workbook to make the LLMs smarter, otherwise we have tools that provide some useful context to agents)
phonon 2mo ago
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patrickkidger 2mo ago
I'd love to have a way to make xlsx files be git-compatible, i.e. stored in plaintext. I realise this may be out-of-scope as it's kind of baked into the file format, but does Nobie offer any functionality in that direction?
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  via the CLI, you could probz stream values and formatting out of the sheet, although we probably need to add a few things to ensure you can reach into every nook and cranny of the xlsx file. We an example on our site of how you might use git & nobie together.
bewal416 2mo ago
It’s honestly welcoming to simply see a modern Numbers alternative- I never liked how Numbers handles filters, sorting, and views all different… all agentic AI stuff sound like a bonus to me
- njaremko 2mo ago
  We were tired of the Mac being a second class experience for working with spreadsheets (we're gonna be shipping this for all platforms soon though). We're going to keep making this thing better and better until people look back on Excel wondering why people ever put up with it. I hope you'll take Nobie for a spin, and give us whatever feedback comes to mind :)
pseudosavant 2mo ago
This is definitely giving of vibes like what Deno/Bun are to Nodejs, Nobie is to Excel. I wish there was a Windows version. Hopefully, this gives the Excel team reason to compete and improve their product like what happened to Nodejs.
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  similar vibes, maybe less drama? lol
- njaremko 2mo ago
  Don't worry, windows is coming... :)
  - 3kidsinacoat 2mo ago
    Looking forward to trying it out on windows, looks really interesting.
mkirsten 2mo ago
Very cool, well done. I’ll try it out! Is the calculation engine for the formulas tour custom, or is it built on top of eg Apache POI?
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  built from the ground up in rust, with the aim that it's much faster than Excel. It supports all Excel formulas.
  - jkaptur 2mo ago
    When you say you support "all Excel formulas", which version of Excel do you mean? I assume you don't support CALL and REGISTER... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/using-the-call-and-register-functions https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/using-the-call-and...
    - njaremko 2mo ago
      That's fair, we don't support the functions tied to custom DLL loading xD To be more precise, we support the entire "modern" function library in excel, that can be implemented without dependencies on Microsoft products/services. So if it can run locally, and isn't platform dependent, we run it. We, for example, support https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/functions/filterxml-function https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/functions/filterxm... , so in some ways, we support more of excel than excel on non-windows platforms :P We also support what-if scenarios, arrays, spills, cycles, all the non-cloud / non-DLL excel functions, data tables, conditional formatting, charts (though we don't allow creating / editing at the moment, that's coming very soon, there's a lot of configuration surface in those things, and we want the experience to be really good), etc. If you haven't tried it, maybe take it for a spin, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with how much functionality we have. Our biggest deficiency right now (in my opinion) is pivot tables, we don't let you create / edit / recalc them (though you can still build formulas on them). Our engine supports them, but we're still doing a bunch of testing on it to make sure it's rock solid before we turn them on for people.
- 2mo ago
liampulles 2mo ago
The copy here says that your data is Local-only and that it can interface with Claude, Codex, or Gemini... are you running these models locally, or am I missing something?
- njaremko 2mo ago
  We're saying we don't take your data. If you choose to use codex or claude, and send your data to them yourself, that's your choice. You don't need to use AI. We're fine if you just want a really good, free, spreadsheet tool :)
rush86999 2mo ago
Is this manipulating excel files using agent AI? How is this different from using a python package like openpyxl and adding a UI layer on top with agentic co-editing? https://github.com/rush86999/atom/blob/main/backend/core/office_service.py#L38 https://github.com/rush86999/atom/blob/main/backend/core/off...
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  openpyxl is great at what it does, but it’s a file-format library rather than a workbook runtime. It can insert columns, for example, but it doesn’t maintain dependencies such as formulas, tables, charts, or defined names when doing so. It also doesn’t evaluate formulas. Nobie runs the workbook like Excel would: it evaluates formulas, maintains workbook semantics through edits, renders the result, and reads and writes the file. Roughly speaking, Nobie is to an Excel workbook what V8 is to JavaScript. openpyxl is closer to a parser and serializer.
  - matthewgapp 2mo ago
    agents do a lot better when they can "run" the excel workbook and understand the impact of inputs, and how pixels look when layering on things like conditional formats.
rjnz199 2mo ago
[flagged]
- njaremko 2mo ago
  I'm not sure I follow, but the math in Nobie ties with the math in Excel. When you use codex / claude in our built-in terminal, the agents get very high signal context about the workbook and what you're doing in it. As far as I'm aware, Nobie is the the best spreadsheet for agentic use-cases explicitly because they don't have to guess anymore.
RichardChu 2mo ago
This is really cool - I think desktop tools, like native apps, CLIs, self-hosted tools, etc., have a lot of potential for innovation since they can be consumed by agents and the user can maintain more privacy, while also using their preferred agents and not being locked into a specific one.
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  yeah that’s how we think about it desktop apps are so back
schneehertz 2mo ago
I noticed that the page does not provide uninstall instructions for the sh installation method. Could you please provide them?
- njaremko 2mo ago
  You're right, we'll update the script to help facilitate uninstall. You just need to delete `~/.nobie` and: - Delete `/usr/local/bin/nobie` - If you're on mac, you also need to delete the .app from `/Applications`
gwid0n 2mo ago
1) The landing page is strange, you can see features (Editing, Pivots etc.) but there are no screenshots of the actual app. I would like to see how different it looks vis-a-vis excel, before I bother to download and install the app. 2) It doesn't look like the app supports external data. Most corporate users have access to some kind of database/data warehouse serving as a repository of data in the organisation. Without this feature, it's pretty much useless in a corporate environment. Unless you analyse external data, like quarterly financials of public companies. Not sure who's the target market/audience for this product.
- njaremko 2mo ago
  - We'll be putting out more content showing off Nobie. Too many screenshots felt distracting for the launch page. - There's no GUI for it at the moment, but you can programmatically load data into Nobie. If you have access to a data store, and you use LLM tools, you can just tell it to load the data in, and it'll work. The target market is all spreadsheet users, so we've definitely put thought into this exact problem.
  - gwid0n 2mo ago
    So LLM retrieves data, puts it in the table (statically, as I understand), I perform some computations in the table and create a pivot table in another sheet. Next month comes, and I want to refresh the report. However, there's no refresh button, so I need to spend time rewriting the query and tokens to retrieve data every month?
    - njaremko 2mo ago
      - Today, you'd likely have the LLM write a script against the CLI, that you'd run whenever you want to refresh (assuming the query is fixed, given your example) - Nobie will continue getting more customizable and programmable. You can see a hint of what's to come with our IDE inspired triple pane support with draggable UI elements. We'll get to a point in the near future where an LLM (or a developer/company) will make you the plugin and UI you want directly in Nobie, and you click a button to sync from your data source (or bind a to a key chord)
stuaxo 2mo ago
"fall in love with it" - maybe just being from the UK but I hate this over the top stuff, when I first went to the Apple shop to buy a Mac they asked when I first used it and then asked "and did you fall in love with it then" - it felt like a proper cult moment.
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  join our cult, you will love it.
kunxue 2mo ago
is it possible to run this install script on ubuntu? curl https://nobie.com/install.sh https://nobie.com/install.sh | sh
- njaremko 2mo ago
  Yep, if you run into issues let me know :)
  - kunxue 2mo ago
    cool
financetechbro 2mo ago
Is a Windows version on the roadmap? I’m surprised an ex banker chose to launch this tool with Mac and not Windows
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  windows is coming
narcraft 2mo ago
Are you able to create formatted tables and use structured references? I see Tables listed as a feature on your webpage, but can't find any further information. If it's in the app already, I'm having trouble finding it.
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  it's a bit hidden and not fully featured. But we do support table references. You can run cmd + T (or search for create table in the cmd +k menu) on a range to display the create table dialog.
  - narcraft 2mo ago
    Ok, I see it now, thanks! I was able to reference columns after adding the table as a defined name manually. You've already mentioned that it's not yet fully featured, but just to catalog a few things: - In Excel, when you format a range as a table, usually they become a defined/named range by default (Table_1). If that's happening in the background, it's not apparent to me as a user - Named ranges should get suggested in autocomplete when typing formulas - The cell name box in the top left corner should reflect range selections (e.g. A1:B4) and likewise table references when selected - The cursor should transform to a down arrow and allow the selection of entire table columns when hovering over header cells - Should likewise be able to select table data range when hovering over the top left corner Sorry if you're already aware of all that!
    - matthewgapp 2mo ago
      we've fixed a bunch of this which will be out in the next release.

96 points by matthewgapp 2mo ago

From what ive seen and some guessing, im thinking you are trying to make Excel a platform, where a Platform means something that is programmable rather than just an App that a user can click or type text in. What platform ideas will you bring in addition to what you have done. Im asking because I am also creating a spreadsheet platform, where everything (lots) of features are programmable rather than users being forced to use what the UI provides.

matthewgapp 2mo ago
Yeah we think there is an opportunity to really open up the xlsx runtime. There are a lot of smart people in the world - and we're excited for them to build on top.

Alfie_667 2mo ago

[dead]

matthewgapp 2mo ago

Hey HN, I’m Matt, the founder of Nobie. I started my career in banking and haven’t been able to shake the deep reverence I have for Excel. I grew up on it. There are many good attempts to reinvent spreadsheets. We’re doing something different. We don’t want people to adopt a new language or move their work to another format. Instead, we want to improve how the Excel language is run and give people a choice of where to run it. That’s what we’re building with Nobie: a second Excel-compatible runtime. It’s available as a native Mac app and as a CLI for macOS and Linux. The engine is written from first principles in Rust. Nobie isn’t done. We are not at Excel parity today. Some features are missing. We’re a team of four systems engineers. For the next eight weeks, all our work is going into closing those gaps. Nobie is free and always will be for everything you can do in Excel. Try it with a real workbook and tell us what breaks. The complicated and ugly ones are especially welcome.

moostii 2mo ago
What is the business model here? The website made think "sounds too good to be true"
- njaremko 2mo ago
  That was our goal :P https://nobie.com/desktop-app-license-terms https://nobie.com/desktop-app-license-terms
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  Fair question. The short version is: the desktop app and CLI are free and always will be; optional cloud & AI services will cost money. Working w/ .xlsx files shouldn't cost money, and we think people should be able to use their own AI. We expect to charge orgs/enterprises for a cloud product around governance, and for AI where/when it makes sense. We also plan to make some money when large companies use Nobie for training or to power their products. Right now, though, we’re entirely focused on making the desktop app and CLI hands down the best xlsx experience in the world. The paid cloud product comes later.
  - matthewgapp 2mo ago
    Also, we've designed the product so it costs us zero dollars to run :) having zero marginal cost is nice and allows us to do things that others can't
    - htrp 2mo ago
      Is this because your free customers bring their own ai/tokens?
      - njaremko 2mo ago
        Yeah, we're not providing subsidized AI to people. It costs us nothing to give people a great, computer-use friendly, native spreadsheet app

njaremko 2mo ago

I'm one of the engineers on the team. We're really excited to be putting this out into the world. There's a massive amount of functionality in this thing that we're hoping will make the lives of everyone who needs to work with xlsx files better. Both programmatically and with a GUI. See https://nobie.com/cli https://nobie.com/cli for the dev focused aspects, but I'm really proud of this thing, and happy that most people will be able to use it for free. Happy to answer any questions people have.

SirFatty 2mo ago

Maybe the title should mention MacOS not "agents and humans"?

njaremko 2mo ago
CLI works on linux too. Windows CLI will be out this week. The GUI already runs on linux, but we didn't want to muddy the launch page today. It will likely be out this week.

njaremko 2mo ago

Some features I think are pretty cool: - We can render pixel perfect PNGs and PDFs (native vectorized PDFs) - You can pass an xlsx, inputs, and output cells, and get a JSON API from any excel workbook - You can pipe a postgres query into an xlsx file, and then run excel formulas over it - You can pretty easily setup a `git diff` helper for xlsx files that shows you the changes you care about - We have a built-in terminal, auto-launchers for Claude and Codex (with some fancy hooks that inject context when you send messages) and a pretty good MCP. After you install Nobie you're agents can do pretty much anything in an xlsx. We also provide a lot of tools that give agents high-signal information about the workbook, so they can quickly get up to speed and do good work - You can programmatically edit workbooks in pleasant ways, and the workbook will update properly, AND recalc incrementally, AND the numbers will tie with Excel (if they don't definitely let us know, but we've put a huge amount of work into making sure they do) - There's a bunch of examples on the CLI page on the website, but a lot of previously impossible/very hard things are now pretty trivial with our CLI, and I think this'll be really useful for for a lot of devs (the CLI will be getting better throughout this week, I have a lot more stuff I want to do with this) - Happy to talk technical details. Everything is from scratch, and our render and calc engines have been a massive amount of work.

MiroslavPokorny 2mo ago
Do you plan to make other features within the spreadsheet "programmable", like allowing the user to "enter a script" to do the formatting of a cell etc ? Im asking because my own spreadsheet efforts are also trying to make the spreadsheet a platform. A lot has been done but there are a few cool features that are nearly there. Everything is on github (look up my name).
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  we have a CLI and we'll launch SDKs. Every aspect of Nobie will be scriptable. Love that your head is in the same place.
petilon 2mo ago
Can I use CLI to convert an .xlsx to PDF? What sort of pagination do you support? Can the page expand to contain the entire sheet? Can you split into physical pages given page size?

ckrapu 2mo ago

Very cool. Excited to try this out sometime!

matthewgapp 2mo ago
let us know your thoughts. we're shipping updates every day

Sorvad 2mo ago

Would love a good, modern Excel alternative. A few feature requests: - Ability to set european number style as standard - Ability to import/open csv

njaremko 2mo ago
- We had a bet internally about how long it'd take for someone to complain about default number styles, we'll get this in by tomorrow - CSV import can be done today either by using claude / codex and telling them to load the CSV into nobie (we install an MCP on first boot of the app, and we have a really nice built-in terminal, you can click the claude / codex buttons in the top button bar to launch them), or using the CLI. We're working on a GUI workflow for it, but CSV is a cursed format, so we want to do it better than Excel
- njaremko 2mo ago
  This slipped a day because I want to make sure I'm handling all the edge cases with locales properly. Sorry about that.

hmokiguess 2mo ago

Tangential, but what's the art style of those images throughout the page? I really like them.

matthewgapp 2mo ago
glad you like em :) we're going for a gritty, off-world museum vibes. Generated with midjourney.
- tomelliot 2mo ago
  can you share your prompt? i love the combination of digital + offworld vibes with the brushstrokes, i'd love to iterate on it. also, such a smart idea to build the excel runtime alternative. remember us when you get snapped up by a lab for a training environment.

HPsquared 2mo ago

Can it handle dynamic array formulas and LET, LAMBDA etc?

njaremko 2mo ago
Yep :) We fully support the formula language, and workbook semantics. The main deficiency we have right now is not letting people create / edit pivot tables. We support what-if scenario analysis, conditional formatting, cycles, lambdas, arrays, spills, lets, etc.
- nhatcher 2mo ago
  That is really cool and impressive! Fantastic job
- dmitry-vsl 2mo ago
  Did you implement formulas from scratch, or used a third-party lib?
  - njaremko 2mo ago
    Everything's from scratch, we've been working on this for a long time :)

gervwyk 2mo ago

Very nice! Keen to try this out, been avoiding to add any MS to my new mac, and bumping into office files a few times a week sucks.

njaremko 2mo ago
I hope you try Nobie out. We've put a lot of effort into making sure its a great experience. We're a native app, so you should expect a reasonable app size, 120fps, fast (correct) calcs, all the keyboard shortcuts from Excel, and a pretty UI. If you're an LLM person, we ship a pretty good MCP, so you can just tell claude/codex to work on the file, and it'll open nobie and update it in front of you (if you use our embedded terminal, you get fancy hooks and context injection from the workbook to make the LLMs smarter, otherwise we have tools that provide some useful context to agents)

phonon 2mo ago

[dead]

patrickkidger 2mo ago

I'd love to have a way to make xlsx files be git-compatible, i.e. stored in plaintext. I realise this may be out-of-scope as it's kind of baked into the file format, but does Nobie offer any functionality in that direction?

matthewgapp 2mo ago
via the CLI, you could probz stream values and formatting out of the sheet, although we probably need to add a few things to ensure you can reach into every nook and cranny of the xlsx file. We an example on our site of how you might use git & nobie together.

bewal416 2mo ago

It’s honestly welcoming to simply see a modern Numbers alternative- I never liked how Numbers handles filters, sorting, and views all different… all agentic AI stuff sound like a bonus to me

njaremko 2mo ago
We were tired of the Mac being a second class experience for working with spreadsheets (we're gonna be shipping this for all platforms soon though). We're going to keep making this thing better and better until people look back on Excel wondering why people ever put up with it. I hope you'll take Nobie for a spin, and give us whatever feedback comes to mind :)

pseudosavant 2mo ago

This is definitely giving of vibes like what Deno/Bun are to Nodejs, Nobie is to Excel. I wish there was a Windows version. Hopefully, this gives the Excel team reason to compete and improve their product like what happened to Nodejs.

matthewgapp 2mo ago
similar vibes, maybe less drama? lol
njaremko 2mo ago
Don't worry, windows is coming... :)
- 3kidsinacoat 2mo ago
  Looking forward to trying it out on windows, looks really interesting.

mkirsten 2mo ago

Very cool, well done. I’ll try it out! Is the calculation engine for the formulas tour custom, or is it built on top of eg Apache POI?

matthewgapp 2mo ago
built from the ground up in rust, with the aim that it's much faster than Excel. It supports all Excel formulas.
- jkaptur 2mo ago
  When you say you support "all Excel formulas", which version of Excel do you mean? I assume you don't support CALL and REGISTER... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/using-the-call-and-register-functions https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/using-the-call-and...
  - njaremko 2mo ago
    That's fair, we don't support the functions tied to custom DLL loading xD To be more precise, we support the entire "modern" function library in excel, that can be implemented without dependencies on Microsoft products/services. So if it can run locally, and isn't platform dependent, we run it. We, for example, support https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/functions/filterxml-function https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/functions/filterxm... , so in some ways, we support more of excel than excel on non-windows platforms :P We also support what-if scenarios, arrays, spills, cycles, all the non-cloud / non-DLL excel functions, data tables, conditional formatting, charts (though we don't allow creating / editing at the moment, that's coming very soon, there's a lot of configuration surface in those things, and we want the experience to be really good), etc. If you haven't tried it, maybe take it for a spin, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with how much functionality we have. Our biggest deficiency right now (in my opinion) is pivot tables, we don't let you create / edit / recalc them (though you can still build formulas on them). Our engine supports them, but we're still doing a bunch of testing on it to make sure it's rock solid before we turn them on for people.
2mo ago

liampulles 2mo ago

The copy here says that your data is Local-only and that it can interface with Claude, Codex, or Gemini... are you running these models locally, or am I missing something?

njaremko 2mo ago
We're saying we don't take your data. If you choose to use codex or claude, and send your data to them yourself, that's your choice. You don't need to use AI. We're fine if you just want a really good, free, spreadsheet tool :)

rush86999 2mo ago

Is this manipulating excel files using agent AI? How is this different from using a python package like openpyxl and adding a UI layer on top with agentic co-editing? https://github.com/rush86999/atom/blob/main/backend/core/office_service.py#L38 https://github.com/rush86999/atom/blob/main/backend/core/off...

matthewgapp 2mo ago
openpyxl is great at what it does, but it’s a file-format library rather than a workbook runtime. It can insert columns, for example, but it doesn’t maintain dependencies such as formulas, tables, charts, or defined names when doing so. It also doesn’t evaluate formulas. Nobie runs the workbook like Excel would: it evaluates formulas, maintains workbook semantics through edits, renders the result, and reads and writes the file. Roughly speaking, Nobie is to an Excel workbook what V8 is to JavaScript. openpyxl is closer to a parser and serializer.
- matthewgapp 2mo ago
  agents do a lot better when they can "run" the excel workbook and understand the impact of inputs, and how pixels look when layering on things like conditional formats.

rjnz199 2mo ago

[flagged]

njaremko 2mo ago
I'm not sure I follow, but the math in Nobie ties with the math in Excel. When you use codex / claude in our built-in terminal, the agents get very high signal context about the workbook and what you're doing in it. As far as I'm aware, Nobie is the the best spreadsheet for agentic use-cases explicitly because they don't have to guess anymore.

RichardChu 2mo ago

This is really cool - I think desktop tools, like native apps, CLIs, self-hosted tools, etc., have a lot of potential for innovation since they can be consumed by agents and the user can maintain more privacy, while also using their preferred agents and not being locked into a specific one.

matthewgapp 2mo ago
yeah that’s how we think about it desktop apps are so back

schneehertz 2mo ago

I noticed that the page does not provide uninstall instructions for the sh installation method. Could you please provide them?

njaremko 2mo ago
You're right, we'll update the script to help facilitate uninstall. You just need to delete `~/.nobie` and: - Delete `/usr/local/bin/nobie` - If you're on mac, you also need to delete the .app from `/Applications`

gwid0n 2mo ago

1) The landing page is strange, you can see features (Editing, Pivots etc.) but there are no screenshots of the actual app. I would like to see how different it looks vis-a-vis excel, before I bother to download and install the app. 2) It doesn't look like the app supports external data. Most corporate users have access to some kind of database/data warehouse serving as a repository of data in the organisation. Without this feature, it's pretty much useless in a corporate environment. Unless you analyse external data, like quarterly financials of public companies. Not sure who's the target market/audience for this product.

njaremko 2mo ago
- We'll be putting out more content showing off Nobie. Too many screenshots felt distracting for the launch page. - There's no GUI for it at the moment, but you can programmatically load data into Nobie. If you have access to a data store, and you use LLM tools, you can just tell it to load the data in, and it'll work. The target market is all spreadsheet users, so we've definitely put thought into this exact problem.
- gwid0n 2mo ago
  So LLM retrieves data, puts it in the table (statically, as I understand), I perform some computations in the table and create a pivot table in another sheet. Next month comes, and I want to refresh the report. However, there's no refresh button, so I need to spend time rewriting the query and tokens to retrieve data every month?
  - njaremko 2mo ago
    - Today, you'd likely have the LLM write a script against the CLI, that you'd run whenever you want to refresh (assuming the query is fixed, given your example) - Nobie will continue getting more customizable and programmable. You can see a hint of what's to come with our IDE inspired triple pane support with draggable UI elements. We'll get to a point in the near future where an LLM (or a developer/company) will make you the plugin and UI you want directly in Nobie, and you click a button to sync from your data source (or bind a to a key chord)

stuaxo 2mo ago

"fall in love with it" - maybe just being from the UK but I hate this over the top stuff, when I first went to the Apple shop to buy a Mac they asked when I first used it and then asked "and did you fall in love with it then" - it felt like a proper cult moment.

matthewgapp 2mo ago
join our cult, you will love it.

kunxue 2mo ago

is it possible to run this install script on ubuntu? curl https://nobie.com/install.sh https://nobie.com/install.sh | sh

njaremko 2mo ago
Yep, if you run into issues let me know :)
- kunxue 2mo ago
  cool

financetechbro 2mo ago

Is a Windows version on the roadmap? I’m surprised an ex banker chose to launch this tool with Mac and not Windows

matthewgapp 2mo ago
windows is coming

narcraft 2mo ago

Are you able to create formatted tables and use structured references? I see Tables listed as a feature on your webpage, but can't find any further information. If it's in the app already, I'm having trouble finding it.

matthewgapp 2mo ago
it's a bit hidden and not fully featured. But we do support table references. You can run cmd + T (or search for create table in the cmd +k menu) on a range to display the create table dialog.
- narcraft 2mo ago
  Ok, I see it now, thanks! I was able to reference columns after adding the table as a defined name manually. You've already mentioned that it's not yet fully featured, but just to catalog a few things: - In Excel, when you format a range as a table, usually they become a defined/named range by default (Table_1). If that's happening in the background, it's not apparent to me as a user - Named ranges should get suggested in autocomplete when typing formulas - The cell name box in the top left corner should reflect range selections (e.g. A1:B4) and likewise table references when selected - The cursor should transform to a down arrow and allow the selection of entire table columns when hovering over header cells - Should likewise be able to select table data range when hovering over the top left corner Sorry if you're already aware of all that!
  - matthewgapp 2mo ago
    we've fixed a bunch of this which will be out in the next release.