What a formula comes to is worked out as you type, by the same rules on every surface; errors show in the cell as #DIV/0!, #REF!, #NAME?, #VALUE!, #CIRC!
Select a block of cells with the mouse or Shift, a whole row or column from its heading, and clear it with Delete
Borders: a side, all around, or every cell, from the buttons over the formula bar — kept in the file beside the cells
Put rows and columns in or take them out from a heading's menu; the formulas follow, as Excel's do
A sheet is a .cell file in the Documents folder of your drive: its cells kept exactly as typed, in My Files, on WebDAV, and open to your assistant and anything that reads JSON
An Excel file (.xlsx) in that folder is a sheet too: opened, edited and saved back as Excel
Export hands any sheet over to save as Excel, as a PDF, or as CSV
Open a sheet from anywhere on your cloud: another folder of your drive, a fileshare, an Excel file somebody put there
Saves as you type; a sheet changed somewhere else is never written over
A first sheet, a small budget, for everyone the first time they open Cells
cm cells show Budget, get Budget B5, set Budget B5 "=SUM(B1:B3)", export Budget ./Budget.xlsx from the command line
Add it to your cloud
In your cloud, open Quills: Administration → Quills as an administrator, Me → Your Quills as anybody else. On its Catalog tab, Cells is on the Productivity shelf: open it and say yes. Its id, wherever your cloud asks for a quill by name:
id cells
Or on the command line, as an administrator for everyone, with --mine for yourself alone:
$ cm quill add cells
Either way your cloud shows you everything below and waits for your yes.
Standard. The installer offers Cells when you set up a new cloud, so you may have it already. How installing works
What it adds to your cloud
Datamodels
The kinds of data it works with. On a fresh cloud everyone can read and write what it brings the moment it is installed; the install sheet says so, and an administrator narrows it with circles. Records belong to the people who write them, not to the quill: removing it leaves every one where it is. What it adds — fields of its own, datamodels of its own — stays too, unless the administrator removing it chooses to drop them.
Indexed fields are kept plain, so your cloud can sort and filter by them. Encrypted fields are encrypted before they reach the disk.
Screens
CellsA sheet of files. This kind of screen is drawn in a later release.
Each is a tab, drawn by your cloud itself on every surface:
Phonethe web app, made for the phone
Webthe full web app, in a browser
Terminalthe terminal app
Command linecm cells
Assistanttools for your assistant, as you
Comes with
Files from datasets/welcome.toml for each person, the first time they open Cells.welcome
Its own code
None. Everything it does is declared in quill.toml and run by your cloud itself.
In its own words
A Quill for Cloudmorrow: small
spreadsheets — cells, numbers and formulas — on the phone, the web app, the
terminal and the command line.
A sheet is cells in rows and columns. Type text, a number, or a formula
starting with =: =SUM(B1:B3), =IF(B5>1000, "over", "under"),
=ROUND(B5/30, 2). The useful part of Excel's formulas, and nothing of
the rest of Excel: no pivots, no charts, no macros.
What a formula comes to is worked out as you type, by the same rules on
every surface, so a sheet never says one thing on the phone and another
in the terminal. What goes wrong shows in the cell: #DIV/0!, #REF!,
#NAME?, #VALUE!, #CIRC!.
A sheet is a .cell file in the Documents folder of your drive on the
server: a plain text file holding its cells exactly as typed — in My
Files, on WebDAV, in a backup of the folder, open to cm, to your
assistant, and to anything that reads JSON. Cells is the kit's sheet
over those files and nothing more. Removing this Quill takes the tab
away, never a sheet.
An Excel file (.xlsx) in that folder is a sheet too: it opens here,
and is saved back as Excel. What the kit keeps — the cells, the formulas,
the borders — goes to and from Excel; fonts, colours and charts do not.
Export hands any sheet to you as Excel, as a PDF, or as CSV.
Open opens a sheet from anywhere on your cloud — another folder of
your drive, a fileshare, an Excel file somebody put there — and it stays
where it is. cm cells export Budget ./Budget.xlsx and
cm cells show my-files:Reports/Q3.xlsx do the same from the command line.
It saves as you type. A sheet changed somewhere else since you opened it
is never written over.
The file, the formulas, and what each surface does, are
docs/CELLS.md
in the Cloudmorrow repository.
Install it from the Quill Catalog, or from this repository with
cm quill add --source https://github.com/Cloudmorrow/quill-cells --ref v2.2.0.
What it adds to your Cloudmorrow
cm quill check prints this for you; keep it here for the catalog page.
Datamodels
uses file
Screens
Cells: the sheets, and one open as a grid — on the phone, the web app, the terminal, cm cells, and to your assistant
Datasets
a first sheet, Documents/Budget.cell, for everyone once
Code
none
On the command line
cm cells list # every sheet, newest first
cm cells add Trip # a new, empty sheet: Documents/Trip.cell
cm cells show Budget # the sheet, worked out, as a table
cm cells show Budget --raw # as typed: the formulas
cm cells get Budget B5 # one cell, worked out
cm cells set Budget B3 150 # one cell; set Budget B3 "" clears it
cm cells set Budget B5 "=SUM(B1:B3)"
cm cells set Budget name=Costs # renames the file; path=2026/Costs moves it to a folder that is there
cm cells show Budget --plain # the cells as JSON, for scripts
Working on it
uv sync # .venv with Cloudmorrow and pytest
cm quill check # the manifest, as a server would install it
cm quill test # tests/, against the real record store and gate
cm quill dev --local # a throwaway server here, reinstalled as you save
