Frockly
A visual editor for understanding complex Excel formulas
Details
- External ID
- 46384322
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- —
- Website domain
- —
- Launched
- Dec. 25, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 56
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8358778625954199
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I built a visual editor that represents Excel formulas as blocks, making it easier to inspect, refactor, and reason about complex formulas structurally. Frockly is not an Excel replacement. It focuses on understanding and refactoring formulas before bringing them back to Excel. Demo: https://ryuu12358.github.io/Frockly/ GitHub: https://github.com/ryuu12358/Frockly Write-up: https://note.com/ryuu12358/n/naa65d9d5facd （Japanese）
Enrichment
- Theme
- markdown editors and writing tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- visual editor for excel formulas
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Building a block-based UI using libraries like Blockly is accessible, but building a fully accurate, bi-directional Excel formula AST parser that supports edge cases, cell references, ranges, and array formulas requires complex compiler logic.
What it would actually take: A production implementation requires an industrial-grade lexer and parser for the full Excel formula grammar (handling dynamic arrays, structured references, R1C1/A1 formats, locale-specific separators, and nested expressions). The stack would combine TypeScript, a parser generator like ANTLR or Chevrotain, and a node-based canvas graph (such as React Flow) capable of round-trip serialization back to raw formula strings without syntax corruption.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: spreadsheet-blocks, excelformulabeautifier.com
Concerns raised: Animated GIFs in README too fast to read/pause, No license specified (now resolved), Mobile accessibility limitations
Feature requests: Syntax highlighting support for Excel formulas, Static screenshots or slower demo instead of fast GIFs
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 34 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #6 of 35 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 46 days after the earliest competitor.
- A terminal spreadsheet editor with Vim keybindings · hn · 2026-04-27 · 126 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Excel Custom Functions in Zig · hn · 2025-11-19 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- SpreadIntel · ph · 2026-09-22 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Excel Formula Translator · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- AIExcel · ph · 2026-09-18 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- DSS, a lightweight TUI spreadsheet editor and dashboard in Go · hn · 2026-04-26 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Modeleon · hn · 2026-05-01 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- ETIC · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.