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Comment by sagaro | Hacker News Reader

There are some use cases where it doesn't need to be bidirectional and yet provide users with the ability to run some formulas or sanity checks etc.

For instance I can publish an article on the economics of ecommerce. And someone consuming my article might want to check the unit economics and might want to just divide the numbers by the total units sold. Instead of having to do that on a calculator, he can just do it on the spreadsheet.

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Right, the idea is you can use Sheet Markup to author interactive spreadsheets. Consumers of those interactive spreadsheets can then modify the data / formulas in the spreadsheet to perform ad-hoc analysis (which are not saved).

That said, I think 8n4vidtmkvmk has a point that it would be nice if when authoring the Sheet Markup, edits in the spreadsheet preview would be applied "in kind" to the Sheet Markup (bidirectional sync). This would mean you could author the Sheet Markup using the spreadsheet preview, instead of relying 100% on Sheet Markup for authoring.

Yes, there should be 2 modes of operation. One for authoring and one for consumers. This link looks like it's authoring because it has the markdown on the left. Viewing mode presumably wouldn't let me edit the markdown at all. In that mode, letting me tinker with the numbers and not have them save might be helpful. But I'd go one step further and add a "Make a copy" button under the sheet which exports the data into Google Sheets or downloads an CSV.

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