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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

Love Soulver. It's such a well-made app. My problem is that I use it so infrequently that I often forget I have it.

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.

> I'd love to find a self-hosted version of one of these

Emacs org mode has entered the chat …

In all seriousness, and depending on your use case, tables and executable code blocks come in handy a lot.

Calca is what I use for this, and I think it has a Windows version. Excellent app, though in maintenance mode as far as I can tell.

Soulver's more versatile and dynamic but also only for iOS/Mac, methinks

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.

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