It's a great idea. I think it's one part of a great tool that would give excel a real run for its money. If you can create, populate and reference tables, I think you'd have a real winner.
Calculations fail if your browser locale uses number formats incompatible with en-US.
E.g. the "How many weekdays in a month?" (near the top of the page) calculation remains blank for me.
Changing the input from "*5" to "4.333333 * 5" makes it work -- the outcome of the previous step is "4,333333" (comma, not dot), breaking the next step...
I've always found these apps interesting, I feel like if Microsoft added one of these to their office suite, it would replace a lot of use cases that people otherwise abuse spreadsheets for.
I'd love to find a self-hosted version of one of these but at the same time wonder if I'd just end up reaching for a jupyter notebook instead.
I’ve used Soulver on the mac to replace a spreadsheet for personal finances and it is amazing. Does a lot of what this does but with better natural language integration and a whole ton of useful functions like compound interest/loan calculations, stock prices, currency conversion, hex math, etc
Microsoft is so close -- after all the office suite already has a built in macro language. I tolerated that language because it was part of my "thinking" app -- Excel -- for so many years. As a non-expert in programming languages, I couldn't fault it in any way, except for being proprietary.
Today, I've gotten to the point where I can barely use any document editing app that doesn't let me insert a code cell, which means for all intents and purposes, Jupyter. Every other authoring tool requires me to copy and paste -- from Jupyter.
Integration with OneNote would be a killer feature. I do a lot of price comparisons and abuse spreadsheets all the time. I have to convert many unit types to ensure apples to apples comparisons which are difficult to keep in your head. So I end up with mangled spreadsheets with tons of text and numbers. Obviously, not the intended use case for spreadsheets.
That was the inspiration for this site a few years back. I wasn't a Mac user at the time so couldn't even try Soulver myself but thought it was a cool idea.
Settings > Calculator > Wolfram|Alpha. You provide a Wolfram ID from WolframAlpha and then "= ?" in a sheet will query WolframAlpha for the previous variable.
Suggestion: parse any number like 12:03 as 12 minutes and 3 seconds (and 04:12:03 with hours) and represent it as seconds. It makes working with durations a lot easier. This is just an additional parsing rule (could also use 12m3 or 4h12m3) like 1e3 for 1*10^3 but is typically not implemented.
I do something equivalent (with far more features) in-Emacs buffers with calc functions on a region, perhaps inside an org-mode note.
I do cite that NOT as a critic for the author NOR as advertisement for Emacs but to state a thing: FULLY INTEGRATED ENVIRONMENTS are the way to go. It's absurd that with an OS/set of apps who can do something you can't do something out-of-context. I'm actually write and email? Why I can't solve some math inside of the mail body?
The sole answer I found is commercial software: keeping things separated means having products on sale. Keep anything integrated means far less.
Speaking of literate-calc mode is AMAZING for these sorts of things. It lets you use emacs-calc in a notebook, so you get units, unit conversions, solving. It's great for quick calculations and units make sure you know immediately if you need to divide or multiply.
I use it all the time to make benchmarks for how long something will take, the memory, etc
Perhaps the most important difference is that expressions re-evaluate automatically on changes. You don’t have to go manually rerun all the dependent expressions, or wait for the kernel to restart, or worry that some of the results you’re seeing might be stale.
This concept has big potential. It is similar to a spreadsheet but allows the free form of data entry which may be empowering to quite a few customers out there.
I love this app on my iPhone. It seems like it has been abandoned and that is super sad. It comes in super handy when traveling and you need to convert currency and for purchases.
Neat! I used to use https://instacalc.com/ for simple calculations, you can share your calculations, but it doesn't have the notepad feature like this one.
I've seen these a couple of times now and they do look pretty cool. Does anyone know if there is an Obsidian plugin that does something similar to this?
Uh, dark mode. Look, if you're going to overwrite the user's browser settings I suggest give, if not full theme choice, at the very least to chose from dark/white mode. I'm a light mode user, so your web app lived on my computer for less than 5 seconds.
Right now they are stored as plaintext on a VPS server (or in localStorage in your browser if you aren't signed in).
I was wondering whether encryption might be compelling as a premium feature if this ever got enough users to think about monetizing it in future. What do you think?
There's no completely offline version. But if you don't sign in then none of your notes are sent to the server, they stay in localStorage in your browser.
I created it a few years ago and recently added the ability to create multiple notes and to sync your notes to the server.
Interested to hear your feedback, please keep it coming!
EDIT:
Just adding that there are two secret features that you can enable via the browser's JavaScript console:
1. Change locale to change the number format used in the answer column:
2. Dark mode: After running either of the above commands, refresh the tab for the change to take effect.