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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Happy to answer any questions people have.
Tangential, but what's the art style of those images throughout the page? I really like them.
glad you like em :) we're going for a gritty, off-world museum vibes. Generated with midjourney.
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.
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)
Would love a good, modern Excel alternative. A few feature requests: - Ability to set european number style as standard - Ability to import/open csv
- 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
Can 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.
Maybe the title should mention MacOS not "agents and humans"?
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.
Very cool. Excited to try this out sometime!
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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; optional cloud & AI services are the biz.
We don’t working w/ .xlsx files should cost money, and we don’t want to force people to buy AI from us. You can bring whatever agent and model you already use.
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 heads down the best xlsx experience in the world. The paid cloud product comes later.
That was our goal :P
https://nobie.com/desktop-app-license-terms