Can it handle dynamic array formulas and LET, LAMBDA etc?
Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
11–20 of 79 posts
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#12Can it handle dynamic array formulas and LET, LAMBDA etc?
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.
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#13Very 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.
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#14Hey 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 t…
What is the business model here? The website made think "sounds too good to be true"
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#15[dead]
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#16Very 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.
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)
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#17Hey 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 t…
What is the business model here? The website made think "sounds too good to be true"
That was our goal :P
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#18I'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?
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#19Hey 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 t…
What is the business model here? The website made think "sounds too good to be true"
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.
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#20I'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?
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.