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Today: 1,953 launches · Niche of the day: specialized calculation tools · See what launched today →

Frockly

A visual editor for understanding complex Excel formulas

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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）

HN · launched Dec 25, 2025 · 56 upvotes (top 16%) · 0 views

Niche: spreadsheet tools and extensions · 138 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -67% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Analytics & BI
  • Prosumer
  • Not AI
  • Commercial product

Source listing ↗

More like this: all 138 launches in spreadsheet tools and extensions →

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 : 72 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #12 of 73 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 46 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

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