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.
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 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.
- 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.
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?
Since you offered... I'm curious about the rendering technology behind it. I'm working on a web app with a spreadsheet interface, and I'm using a standard canvas-rendered grid.
You obviously have different design constraints, so it would be interesting to see how they shaped your solution.
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).
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
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
33 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 66.7 ms ] threadThere 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.
See 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.
- 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.
Since you offered... I'm curious about the rendering technology behind it. I'm working on a web app with a spreadsheet interface, and I'm using a standard canvas-rendered grid.
You obviously have different design constraints, so it would be interesting to see how they shaped your solution.
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).
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?
https://github.com/rush86999/atom/blob/main/backend/core/off...
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.
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.