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jack_ruru

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Show HN: Frockly – A visual editor for understanding complex Excel formulas

56 ポイント·投稿者 jack_ruru·7 か月前·21 コメント

Ask HN: How do you deal with large, hard-to-read Excel formulas?

13 ポイント·投稿者 jack_ruru·7 か月前·12 コメント

コメント

jack_ruru
·6 か月前·議論
Larger update since the last post:

– Added the i18n foundation – Introduced an initial French translation – Implemented URL parameter support for loading state and navigation

Thanks again for the feedback — it directly influenced this refactor.
jack_ruru
·6 か月前·議論
Yes, they’re related in spirit — thanks for the link!

Spreadsheet-blocks focuses more on building spreadsheets visually, while Frockly is primarily about inspecting and refactoring existing Excel formulas and making their structure explicit.

I think they’re exploring adjacent but slightly different problems.
jack_ruru
·6 か月前·議論
Thanks for all the comments! I just added mobile view support and updated the README based on the feedback.
jack_ruru
·6 か月前·議論
That’s fair feedback — I’ll add static screenshots or a slower demo. Thanks for pointing it out.
jack_ruru
·6 か月前·議論
Good catch — I’ve added an MIT license to the repository. Thanks for pointing it out.
jack_ruru
·6 か月前·議論
Thanks! Please feel free to open an issue or a PR on GitHub. I’d be happy to discuss improvements there.
jack_ruru
·7 か月前·議論
Yeah, that’s usually what I do as well. Breaking formulas down into smaller pieces with clear intent helps a lot.

What I’ve been thinking about lately are cases where large formulas already exist, and changing the sheet structure (adding helper columns or moving things around) isn’t always practical.

In those situations, it feels useful to first understand what the existing formula is doing structurally, before deciding whether and how to refactor it.

I’m not convinced this is a better approach yet — just exploring the space.
jack_ruru
·7 か月前·議論
Yeah, I agree — LET and LAMBDA are surprisingly powerful. They definitely help with naming intermediate values and avoiding recomputation.

The limitation I keep feeling is less about expressiveness and more about working with existing formulas: debugging, making small changes, or explaining intent to someone else.

Even with LET/LAMBDA, the structure still lives mostly in a single line of text, and the formula bar UI doesn’t really help you reason about that structure. That’s the gap I’ve been curious about exploring.
jack_ruru
·7 か月前·議論
Yeah, that’s usually what I do as well. Breaking formulas into helper columns definitely makes things clearer.

What I’ve been running into is cases where large formulas already exist (and refactoring them into multiple columns isn’t always an option), so I started wondering whether a structural representation could help with understanding and small edits, rather than replacing that approach.

I’m not convinced it’s better yet — just exploring the space.