[njaremko]

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]

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]

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.

[eejdoowad]

Gave it a spin and it feels really polished!

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.

[njaremko]

We've gone through a bunch of iterations. One of those iterations was canvas, but we care a lot about the user experience, and found getting the frame times we wanted on huge workbooks wasn't practical, so we graduated to webgpu/webgl, and that was better, but we kept hitting bugs in the web rendering engines that we couldn't tolerate, so now we've ended up going down to the metal and writing an engine on top of metal/vulkan/opengl (we still have a webgpu/webgl backend, but we're not using it at the moment).

You didn't ask a specific question, but it basically comes down to getting really good at calculating layout fast, getting good at figuring out how to incrementally maintain your rendered view, then getting really good at figuring out how to optimally use the hardware you're targeting.

[petilon]

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?

[njaremko]

Yes, you can print an xlsx to PDF as excel would if you printed the same file (respecting whatever print layout has been done in excel). It'll be vectorized, so you have infinite resolution on zoom for text.

We do not yet support editing print layout, so you can't adjust the pagination / change the page size in / with Nobie yet, but that will come soon :)