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/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.
- 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)
- 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.
I linked in this thread, and Matt replied above in this thread, but we charge companies making >$100M in revenue for using Nobie to provide a service to users, or for using it to help train models.
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.
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 :)
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)
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.
- 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