Programming pastimes

Markdown spreadsheet

Someone on Hacker News commented that they wished someone would make an application to view spreadsheets in Markdown. The idea is to have a spreadsheet in a plain-text file that can be modified with any text editor and doesn't require Excel or other specialized application to make changes.

I had recently heard about Ironcalc spreadsheet engine and thought it shouldn't be too hard to create a Markdown front-end to the Ironcalc engine. I wrote a simply parser that reads a markdown table and sends any formulas to the spreadsheet engine. It doesn't do any fancy high-powered operations like sorting or pivot tables. But it can manage basic formulas and functions just fine. The finished product is on Github.

Markdown spreadsheet viewer Modifications made in the left editor panel cause the spreadsheet panel to immediately recalculate all the formulas.
It understands these file formats: .md, .csv, .dif, .slk, .ser

Demo video